Movies recently watched

I still haven't figured out how I want to do these. First there was this crazy ramble where I sound like a freak, then other attempts followed, but I'm still not satisfied. I want a regular thing where I do little capsule reviews, but I want to keep it fresh and un-movie-review-like, if that makes sense. So, once more I reinvent this thing. . .

The Spiral Staircase
Sadly, there aren't any bitchy old women like Ethel Barrymore anymore. This movie is more fun as a comedy than as a thriller, what with Elsa Lancaster hamming it up and Sara Allgood's Nurse playing Felix to Barrymore's Oscar. But those eyes! Those eyes! It's one of my secret phobias, but now everyone will know: I'm terrified of "intense" and/or buggy eyes. Fear:

Johnny O'Clock
Dick Powell: sex on a stick in this one. Oh, why do I love his flat delivery so? It's like he thinks that by delivering his lines in a disinterested monotone the audience will be fooled into thinking he's all tough and shit, and yet, I love it and totally buy him as tough guy! He plays the kind of asshole who gets the chicks because some chicks secretly love an asshole who lives up to the hype. And Powell lives up to the hype with his snappy noirish dialogue (Bad Guy: "You get in my way and I'll kill you;" Johnny O'Clock: "You took the words right out of my mouth"), gun battles and bullet wounds, and the sad, soulful eyes he turns on the hat check girl's sister. And yeah, they totally did it, and it wasn't just the cigarette that told you: She was wearing a completely different outfit when they faded back in after the clinch! Evelyn Keyes, you tramp. Still trying to out-do your sister, Scarlett, eh? Also, could Ellen Drew be any trampier and awesome? No. Someone needed to make a movie all about her character.

The Facts of Life
You take the good, you take the bad, you take it all and there you have a fairly intelligent adult comedy about adultery that did the impossible for me: Made me like the adulterating couple. And it didn't turn the other spouses into jerks in order to do it. And it also didn't make the two cheaters getting together seem like the height of romantic fulfillment. But yet, you still liked seeing these two people being happy together. And then you liked seeing them go back to their respective spouses at the end (spoiler alert!). I'm not sure how the filmmakers did it, but I am sure, in our developmentally arrested times, we'll never see the likes of this movie again. Artistic regression, thy name is Now.

101 Dalmatians
I have seen this one before, so don't think I grew up deprived or anything. But man, seeing it again now as an adult who's obsessed (among other things) with the cool hepness of the 50s and early 60s, this one's out of sight! I could stare at the backgrounds all day long:

Her Highness and the Bellboy
June Allyson has to go. She ruined a perfectly good piece of 1940s cotton candy and turned it into a downer with a stupid fantasy musical number that reminded me of Shirley Temple's fantasy sequence from A Little Princess only bad. Replace cute little Shirley with adult June and yes, it really is that annoying. I'm still not sure what her good qualities were besides being cripple. I know Hedy is in love with that random newspaper guy who shows up for five minutes in the middle of the movie and then disappears until the credits, but who can blame Robert Walker for wanting to trade Allyson's two-packs-a-day smoker's voice for Lamarr's fun little German accent. A more accurate title for this one might be, "Her Annoyingness and the Bellboy and also their Is-he-mentally-challenged? friend who chews a lot of scenery, and oh yeah, also some princess or something, we're not really sure why she's here except as eye candy."

Movies recently watched

Pretty Good, but suffers from cloying, unnecessary-pulling-of-heartstrings flashback syndrome and would have been much creepier if we never knew what happened to his family, call it the Val Lewton principle, What We Can Imagine Happened to His Family Is Always Scarier Than What You Show Us:
I Am Legend

I love Will Ferrell, okay? Lay off:
Semi-Pro

The MASTERPIECE that most people will think is too long and boring, but I could easily watch twelve more hours of Deakins's pictures and Casey Affleck's cold, cold eyes and never get bored:
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford

A little too stagy, and feels so slight for a Hollywood "classic", but Hepburn is wonderful in the party scene doing Shakespeare:
Morning Glory

Thinks it's a Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell/Ralph Bellamy screwball, when it should really be a Jean Arthur (or Barbara Stanwyck)/Gary Cooper/Walter Brennan (or Thomas Mitchell) screwball, and John Krasinski is Gary Cooper (so, guess who that makes Clooney?):
Leatherheads. To be fair, I thought the first half was good, and I loved the old Universal logo at the beginning -- perfect mood setter! -- but it got way too serious in the second half, and watching the third act revealed just how badly the first act did of setting it up (we should have seen those trick plays in the first act, just so we could actually know what we were missing in the third act once the rules came in -- the "no rules" vs "rules" thing seemed tacked on), and Zellweger's character became totally unlikable once she decided to not feel bad about tricking John K's character.

If this is 1936 and Capra's directing, reporter gal Jean Arthur feels bad about tricking the nice guy for a story, and she ends up falling for him in the end and they fight the real corrupt liars (like the sports agent and the commissioner who knows there's too much money involved to let a scandal happen). But it's 2008, so apparently using someone's affections and trust and then betraying those affections and trust is a perfectly acceptable move, as long as you get the story and expose the "lie." And of course you have to fall in love with The Clooney, since his name is above the marquee, since he's the "Last Movie Star", even though you have no chemistry with him and actual sparks with Jim from the Office, but whatevs -- this movie is just another in an ever-growing long line that prove that the traditional screwball comedy is the only major movie genre that couldn't survive into a post-1960 world. Which totally bums me out, because I really wanted to love this movie, and if someone who better understood the genre traditions of screwball had script-doctored this thing, it could have been a minor classic.

Movies recently watched

The Ones I Liked (I think I've decided I'm done with grades and ratings, since I'm not a professional critic, and don't much care to be one. Just like to analyze and discuss and act all cinema-crazy, no need for elaborate grades and such. Plus, I'm too soft-hearted and easy-to-please to give out grades that would mean anything to anyone anyway.):

Again, The Ones I Liked:
Juno
Ride the High Country
Foreign Correspondent
Semi-Pro
Miss Austen Regrets (PBS, 2008)
Northanger Abbey (PBS, 2008)
Raisin in the Sun (ABC, 2008)
The Goodbye Girl
Miller's Crossing
Vacancy


The Ones I Didn't Much Care For:
Persuasion (PBS, 2008)
Mansfield Park (PBS, 2008)

Is it needless to say that these are all first-time viewings for me? Well, consider it said. These are first-time viewings. (And that goes for any future "Movies recently watched" as well, which, of course, might not ever get written, as it is my way these days to be reckless and absentminded and totally random about the blog, but just in case, this here is my explanation). And if I ever do mention a movie on one of these posts that I have seen before, I will specify and possibly explain my multiple-viewing reaction in *slight* detail. Such as: "This was my reaction the first time I saw it. This is my reaction now." Etc. etc.

And now I'm laughing because this post, which was intended to be a short and sweet little list of movies to fill some blog space and make it seem like I had something to say about film, has turned into something bigger, and in fact, is less concerned about the actual topic (you know, "Movies recently watched") and more concerned with explanations and minutiae and unfocused ramblings as to the hows and whys and whats of the thing. The previous sentence is a perfect example of what I mean: unrelated to the main intent of the post (the movie list) except in that it makes mention of it by way of complaint. I gotta work on ordering my thoughts a little better. I should re-title this post: "Explanations on grading, aversions to said grading, and the uselessness thereof as it relates to the author, and first-time viewing assumptions that should be made by readers, including a self-referential complaint about content, with a list of movies liked and disliked mentioned briefly but unspectacularly, which can be avoided if wished, you wouldn't be missing anything."

I want to remedy this. So:

I was pleasantly surprised by Ride the High Country and Vacancy. I've always told myself I wasn't a Westerns girl, and yet every Western I've watched recently has been highly enjoyable. I think I might actually like Westerns, and it'll be getting close to love territory if this keeps up. All those horses and American mythmaking and strong, tough, good men. Vacancy was tense and scary and surprisingly touching. Not sure it would work on a second go 'round because the plot is mostly "Will they make it?!" and once you know how it ends, there's nothing to go back for. Except for maybe that surprising tenderness I mentioned, so maybe it would be okay on second viewing. Stay tuned. . .

I can't give a good justification for Semi-Pro to those who consider themselves discerning movie watchers. It's stupid, poorly written, minor league movie making. But Will Ferrell makes me laugh, a lot, in everything he does really, and this movie made me laugh, and when I'm watching a comedy, if it makes me laugh, then I'm gonna like it. That's my formula (see above: my not being equipped to review movies in any intelligent way). I laughed at Semi-Pro. Helluva lot, actually. But I would probably laugh at Will Ferrell reading a blank piece of paper, so that's where my taste level and sense of humor are.

I feel a little better about this post. Got a few limp scraps of meat and rubbery pieces of fat hanging off it now. And with that delightful image, I finish.