Saturday Night Movie Thread [moviegique]: Potpourri

The Los Angeles-Israeli Film Festive kind of snuck up on us this year, and it doesn't look like The Boy and I will be able to catch any of them, but we still managed to see a half-dozen good-to-great films this fortnight-and-a-half.

Let's get started.

Heretic

It's ridiculously hard to find a picture from this movie that isn't completely murky.

In what some (not me) are calling the best horror movie of the year, Hugh Grant plays a maniac atheist who lures a couple of young LDS missionaries into his house to test their faith. Top notch acting with Grant avoiding his famous and easily-impersonated acting twitches and stammers, and the two girls (Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East) giving surprisingly nuanced performances.

The major surprise of this film is how it avoids many of the expected tropes. The two girls are presented in veritably clichéd ways at first, but as the movie goes on, we're surprised by how they respond to the various challenges they face. Hugh Grant gives a lecture on how Christianity mirrors dozens of faiths in the past—there's a theme here of imitation which touches both metaphysical and literal aspects of the story—and his big reveal is that it's all just a control mechanism.

But he's a literal maniac, a cruel monster beyond even what we see right away, and at no point is he admirable. He's basically the stereotypical Internet atheist, only more energetic.

There's a reference here to something called "The Great Prayer Experiment" which purportedly showed that prayer didn't work. I found that fascinating since as I was growing up, I remember reading studies that shower prayer did work. Looking it up it seems like the current "science" is that prayer actually makes things worse. Heh.

Saturday Night

Can you figure out who is supposed to be who in this picture?

I generally avoid biopics, as they tend to reduce people's lives into very formulaic cartoons, but the Barbarienne wanted to see this—she's a big Jim Henson fan—and it's very entertaining, and absurd. It takes a lot of vignettes (mostly from the first generation Saturday Night run) and shoves them into the two hours before the premiere took place.

Chevy Chase is shown as an insufferable egomaniac who loses his girlfriend to an overly endowed Uncle Milty, and his future disastrous late night talk show career is presaged. John Belushi is a fragile, barely sane, self-imagined Marlon Brando who quits because Polaroid is going to sponsor the show. Dan Aykroyd is a smooth-talking lothario. Jane Curtin is skilled but clear-eyed about what's going on while Laraine Newman is more of a wide-eyed naïf being seduced by Aykroyd. Gilda is kind of low-key and whimsical. Garrett Morris has no idea why he's there.

First host George Carlin hates everything and everyone.

When they're "on", the not-ready-for-prime-time players are pretty good, though lacking even a fraction of the original cast's charisma. When they're in the background and to the side, it's easy to forget who's who.

That's okay, though, because it's really the Lorne Michaels story. Will he be able to get the show on the air or will they end up re-running Carson? Will he figure out what his relationship is with his sort-of wife? (They try to make a thing out of what name she's going to use, but it's not really a strong part of the film, just kind of '70s weirdness.) What even is this show? Nobody can answer!

I'm sitting there going "It's a variety show with an emphasis on comedy, a perfectly ordinary thing for 1975, just a little saucier."

As surviving cast members have commented, while not strictly accurate, it captures the feel of the era, and I can buy that. The pace makes it such that it's a very lively (real time) watch.

The Burmese Harp (1956)

A pacifist Japanese WWII movie?

Ever hear of it? Me, neither. The Boy and I saw this on Election Day and, while it's a great movie, The Boy was too stressed to enjoy it much. It's very low-key: A Japanese troop in Burma at the end of WWII has one soldier, Mizushima, who has learned to play the Burmese harp, and dresses in Burmese clothes, so he can act as a scout.

The harp ends up alerting them to danger, saving them from a deadly firefight, and identifying Mizushima at various points in the movie.

The plot is that, after trying to save a bunch of holdouts from getting shelled by the British, Mizushima is separated from his troop and has to cross Burma on foot to rejoin them, which he does in the stolen robes of the monk who saved his life. And on the journey he is treated with the tremendous respect accorded to Burmese monks, and also a witness to the mountains of Japanese corpses who died in the jungle.

The journey changes him and he's torn between wanting to go home and feeling a need to bury his dead countrymen.

Really interesting and moving film, but probably not the best to watch if you're biting your nails over election results. (I wasn't but, as mentioned, the Boy was.) My two random observations were: 1) That doesn't sound like a Burmese harp. It sounds like a western harp. 2) I wonder if all those gorgeous Buddha monuments are the ones the Muslims destroyed?

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

Maggie Smith in her prime. Pamela Franklin not?

I wasn't actually expecting that much from this, Maggie Smith's breakout film, beyond a great performance from the late Ms. Smith herself, and was actually pretty bowled over. It was nuanced in a way I can't imagine a modern film being (and by 1969, the grossly simplistic Boomer world-view was being ensconced).

It's 1930s England, and Miss Jean Brodie (Smith, duh) is teaching her class at the all-girl school where she proudly announces she's "in her prime". The sole source of this is her own heart, which is the source of almost everything she does, much to the annoyance of the school staff and faculty.

So, you think "Oh, free-thinking woman sticking it to the stuffed shirts"—but, no! She's basically loathed at her school by everyone but her students and the two men wooing her. Her professed love of her students is a weirdly narcissistic fantasy with dire consequences. She decides their fates, incorrectly, and spends a large amount of time lavishing adoration on Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini.

Meanwhile, she's in love with the school's art teacher. They had a fling which she broke off, and he's been chasing her ever since. (He's a married Catholic man with an increasing number of children as the movie goes on.) There's a staid, dependable, wealthy guy who adores her, but she's strongly resisting his proposals. (Although I do think they canoodle.)

And the camera is showing us all the time: This is not this woman's prime. She's 35 (which is ancient for a single woman in 1969) and Dame Maggie looks at least that old. (She aged rapidly, I think, and even in her 20s didn't look that young.)

And still, for all her ridiculousness and narcissism, we still like her. We're rooting for her. It's a tragedy, in that sense, as she has no capability to self-correct. One can hardly imagine what lies in her future. In today's world, we'd suspect lots of white wine and cats.

Smith won a well-deserved Oscar. Rod McKuen was nominated for the title song, which is loathsome, but his ham-handed romantic score actually works in the film proper because it's basically white-hot irony (whether McKuen knew it or not).

(We played guess the rating after watching this, with Pamela Franklin being fully nude in this movie that features a middle-age man in an affair with a 16-17 year-old girl. It was and remains rated PG.)

Juror #2

o/~I heard he played a good song...~\o

Clint Eastwood's (maybe) last film is a solid morality tale which I probably rate higher than most, because it's a real movie from Hollywood, where the characters have believable motivations and are driven to desperate, even evil actions, such that the sort of happy ending crowds like just can't happen without some sort of deus ex machina, and that ain't the way Eastwood rolls.

Nicholas Hoult finds himself as the titular juror in a case that Toni Collette is trying. She's trying put away a guy who allegedly killed his girlfriend and dumped her body in a ditch during a rainstorm the previous fall. Except the more Justin (Hoult) hears, the more convinced he becomes that he was the one who killed the girl.

Justin, who's expecting a child (after losing twins on the night of the death), tries to figure out all possible ways he can of getting the accused off, but Collette is running for D.A., so she needs to put someone away for the crime. If he can't get the jurors to acquit, if he hangs the jury, they'll just hold the trial again. But the more he tries to get the falsely accused off, the more he risks implicating himself.

So we start with a 12 Angry Men type premise, and go into an almost "Columbo"-style reverse engineering of a crime we already know all about, and then end up with the moral dilemma.

Very solid flick. Not a crowd-pleaser, but nowhere near as dark as, say, Mystic River. It's a shame that WB seems to have buried it. It was amusing to see Hoult and Collette reunited. (They played son and mother in About A Boy, speaking of Hugh Grant.)

Bogart: Life Comes In Flashes

Iconic.

I naturally adored this biography of Humphrey Bogart, which leans heavily on Bogie's own writings (read by someone doing a mild impression of Bogart). Lots of fun and interesting vignettes detailing his struggle as an actor, as an already thrice-married man whose last wife was literally insane and shooting at him—and whom he told the already smitten Lauren Bacall he had to give another chance since she said she had given up drinking.

He seems like a decent, hard-working guy who never believed his own press.

Biographies usually tend to linger too long after the deaths of their subjects, and I appreciated that this one didn't. (It didn't dwell overmuch on his death, though it was a horrible one.) I thought it spent too much time on things that weren't particularly relevant (like his mother being a suffragette and Prohibition) or which have been overdone and which weren't enlightening. Like, Bogie and Bacall objected to the HUAC and because Bogie was that famous, both the Communists and the anti-Communists decided he was a Red.

Meh. I would've liked to hear more about how the Hollywood power couple started the Rat Pack, and more about Bogie's lifetime friendships with John Huston, Leslie Howard, Hepburn and Tracy, and so on.

Still, if you're a Golden Age of Hollywood fan, it's a must see.

posted by Open Blogger at 07:31 PM

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