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Saturday Evening Movie Thread [moviegique]: Year-end roundup

The end of the year numbers are looking pre-pandemic levels, with over 100 films seen in theaters and drive-ins all over the country! (OK, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Let me have this!) Hopefully 2025 will be even better. Here's a round-up of the past three weeks of movie viewing.

Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Catherine Deneuve plays the ingenue in this odd French musical about a sixteen-year-old who wants to marry her twenty-year-old boyfriend, has sex with the night before he's deployed to Algeria, then ends up gestating and dithering because of the boy's ambiguous letters home while a rich local courts her. (I know, right? French!) This is a very odd film. When La La Land came out, my friend (@JulesLaLaLand, fittingly enough) used to warn people by saying it was more Cherbourg than Singin' In the Rain, and I came out of this thinking Damien Chazelle had basically lifted this movie to make La La Land. Oh, it's careers rather than the draft and a pregnancy driving people apart, but somehow that felt to me like details.

The Boy was not much impressed by my evaluation, nor the movie.

The film is ninety-six minutes but it can actually feel like it drags a bit because a) the characters never stop singing; b) the singing is basically what we'd call recitative. That is, it's like an opera without the arias. Everyone delivers their dialogue in song, but very low-key song without, e.g., choruses or a lot of repetition. So it sort of feels like one hour-and-a-half long song.

It worked for me, in that the theme of the movie, which is frequently recapitulated, feels completely different at the end than it does at the beginning, and the ending is bittersweet, to say the least. Chazelle turns it up to eleven for La La Land, giving a dramatic visualization of what might have been: This is far more low-key.

"Maybe if we sold something other than umbrellas, I wouldn't have to marry some rich guy?"

Flow

To follow on last time's Pakistani animated feature (The Glassworker), this time we have a Latvian cartoon. That's right, the land of tall, beautiful blondes is getting in on the drawn pictures bit with this remarkable silent film, Flow. When I say "silent," I mean there's no dialogue, and why should there be? The lead character is a cat.

Well, those of us with experience in these things might point out that being a cat is no barrier to speaking in the movies, to which I would only note that the co-stars are dogs, storks, lemurs, a capybara—and yes, yes, we've seen them all talk before, but these animals are realistic.

Well, semi-realistic. They seem pretty good with abstract thought and ship navigation. But perhaps I should explain.

Flow is an apocalyptic story. A cat realizes the water is rising and runs home, the water continues to rise and rise and rise and ultimately she(?) ends up on a boat with an assortment of animal which are not geographically coincident.

I spent a silly amount of time wondering when and where this was. The boy said "Aren't ring-tailed lemurs native to Madagascar," to which I replied, "Yes, they like to move-it move-it." But capybaras are New World creatures!

Anyway, I think the point is, this is an apocalyptic movie of some other timeline. It feels very biblical, if not quite Biblical, as the stork-like birds are unlike any other bird I've seen, and seem to be angelic or demonic or otherworldly. (One literally seems to go to Heaven.)

What's it about? Very primal things: Survival, adaptation, friendship. Things like that. It's 86 minutes and keeps your interest the whole time, even if you're not quite sure what you just watched. I don't know what Hollywood's putting out these days as far as cartoons, but it's probably not as good as either this or The Glassworker.

Having a capybara at the helm doesn't bother me, but the ship was made by Boeing! Heyooooo!

The Wages of Fear (1953)

This recently remade classic French film is so good, so excellent as a character study and an action film, that I'm willing to overlook its ridiculously stupid French ending.

A bunch of losers (Italians, French, Germans) living in the ass end of Mexico, have a chance to escape when a oilfield fire requires a shipment of nitroglycerin be delivered, and the oil company doesn't want to risk good people. Given a potential payout of 2,000 American dollars, these desperados are eager to make the trip.

So, we spend about forty minutes getting to know Mario (Yves Montand) and his roommate Luigi (yes, I'm not making this up), and then the next two hours in trucks with them as they navigate poorly maintained roads and high tempers in an attempt to not blow up.

One-hundred fifty minutes of great moviemaking with a great, moving ending, and then a little coda which sucks, but which is very French-cinema-in-the-'50s. I kept dreading it, because I saw it coming early on. Just ignore it, or turn it off at the end—you'll know when, actually.

In a typical modern blunder, the movie was remade last year about a "crack squad of illicit" whatevers for French Netflix.

I am not making this up: Left, Luigi. Right, Mario.

The Last Dance

A man whose wedding planner business is ruined by the pandemic lockdowns ends up taking over his girlfriend's uncle's funeral business, in this very human film from the maker of Things You've Never Heard Of starring People You've Never Seen.

I mean, I'm assuming on your behalf. While many looked familiar to me, I'm not versed enough in Chinese cinema and television to get past a "they all look alike" thing.

It always fascinates me when people I've never heard of can make a movie on a topic I've never even considered—in this case, the Funeral-industrial Complex—and hit it out of the park.

Our hero, Dominic, is an upper middle-class guy with a lot of debt from trying to keep his business going and his employees employed during the lockdown who inherits half of a mortuary (essentially). The other half is owned by a Taoist priest who, along with his minions, performs the ritual of Breaking The Hell's Gate.

This grouchy old priest, known as "Mr. Hello" for reasons we don't know until the end, is a crusty, old-fashioned type who jangles with the modern Mr. Dominic, but who is instantly endearing for his sincerity toward a tradition which is essentially a racket. (Notably, the Taoist Priests are supposed to be vegetarian, and they are—publicly.

Mr. Hello is genuine, and Dominic offends him by bringing him a full Chinese dinner (including a full sucking pig) to butter him up.

Dominic's character arc begins when he takes on, for the money, a crazy woman who wishes to have her young son embalmed rather than cremated. Because no one will do it, he ends up handling the job himself, and this leads him to learning all the aspects of his trade. Beyond the superficial marketing (where the survivors will make up souvenirs of the deceased for attendees in the form of, e.g., tiny racecar tchotchkes), he begins to realize that he serves a genuinely spiritual purpose, for the living.

Mr. Hello's story arc has to do with his tendentious relationship with his children. His son is exactly the sort of terrible Taoist priest he dislikes, one who converts to Catholicism in a bid to gain admittance for his own son in a quality Catholic school, and then tries to keep this secret from his father.

Meanwhile, his daughter is an EMT who is...let's say modern. She wanted to be the Taoist priest, but "women are filthy". The whole arc on this is surprising and moving.

It worked for us, though we might have felt different if we were Cantonese Taoists.

"The first rule is...avoid bright light."

Her Story

Another film which would be completely unwatchable if it came out of Hollywood becomes quality in the hands of the Chinese, Her Story is about a single mom editor/journalist who's trying to figure out life, while her ex-husband and boy toy drummer try to out-Alpha each other in increasingly hilarious ways.

I found myself asking why this story, which would seem positively trite in a Hollywood film, works?

And the answer is: Because the answers aren't obvious. Our heroine, Timei, is the strong, single woman that everyone looks up to. And she's kind of a mess. And the others around her looking up to her are looking up because of their own defects.

At the same time, you kind of like everyone. The men are peripheral characters, mostly, yes, but they're not weenies for that. They're mostly confused about what woman want, and they're just trying to measure up to essentially non-existent standards.

But mostly, I think it's just very human. The Chinese still remember how to human. The one-upmanship between the men is comically relatable, and the little lies and machinations of the wacky neighbor Ye are understandable.

Timei herself has given up journalism because she's too tired and afraid to print things people won't like. And by "people," I mean the government that has the ability to censor immediately whatever she writes, and risks her ability to the pay the bills.

I assume, on some level, this is all a sham double-bluff reverso, since the PRC could probably just vanish anyone they didn't like. Nonetheless, someone making the movie knows what makes a good story.

The "Her"s in question.

Nosferatu (2025)

I don't know. A remake of a German silent horror picture, or a remake of a remake of a German silent horror picture, that carries the essential message of "promiscuity is the harbinger of societal doom" did not strike me as a likely hit, and I had wagered with The Boy that this would turn out $50M-ish at the box office.

It currently sits at $60M+ so, good job on your biggest hit, Mr. Eggers.

I had a hard time getting into this movie, even as I loved all the typical Eggers-ian stuff—the moody, atmospheric, immersive historical sense of living in a German sea town as a plague descends, combined with gloriously old-fashioned horror techniques. I think, and I am not kidding, it's because there were too many people in the audience.

I may go re-watch, actually.

But the amazing thing about this movie is that embraces all the wonderful (and presumably schlocky) effects of old school horror. Since at least the '70s, there's been an effort to make Dracula into an action franchise. This completely eschews all that for creaking doors, shadows reaching over the townscape (which actually reminded me a lot of Murnau's Faust), and spooky noises.

Like, a classic moment in any Dracula is when he appears at the window. How is he going to come in. In the 1931 version, he's a bat on a string, cut to horrified girl, cut back to Bela Lugosi. Later on the bat animates into Lugosi (and other Draculas). By the '70s, he's a cloud of smoke coalescing. And so on.

Here? He's at the window. Cut to horrified girl. Cut to Skarsgaard.

Loved it. There were a lot of little things I loved, and yet couldn't believe my eyes as the Mina character—from the first scene—is to blame for Nosferatu due to a moment of teenage weakness that an alpha bad boy exploits. I mean, Dracula is often considered a sexual metaphor of sorts (too much, in my opinion) but this just outright spells it out: Keep it zipped ladies, or you doom us all.

I really didn't expect that to catch on with a modern audience.

Spooky! That's Johnny Depp's kid!

Strait-Jacket (1964)

I closed out the year with Joan Crawford in this William Castle classic, Strait-Jacket. Crawford begins as a middle-aged woman who is widowed and remarries Lee Majors for love. Turns out, Lee Majors needs a lot more love than Crawford can give him, and before you can say "Lizzie Borden", Joan has chopped their heads off with an axe.

The movie mostly takes place twenty years later and a supposedly recovered Joan has been released from the sanitarium and gone to live with her surviving daughter, an endlessly forgiving woman who has completely gotten over witnessing the beheading twenty years later.

But wouldn't you know, even modern psychiatric efforts can't guarantee our poor lady's sanity, and people start turning up headless again right and left.

Legitimately the best movie William Castle ever made, with Crawford's acting being a highlight (even if it doesn't quite all add up in a character development sense), the quality may be its downfall. By far the best parts are the campy, ham-handed and audacious aspects, such as a lanky, young George Kennedy beheading a chicken, or the rich dairy farmer father of Crawford's daughter keeping a pitcher of milk out the way you would water, and constantly offering a glass of milk to people.

The rather predictable script by Robert Bloch will not surprise you if you've ever seen a Castle film.

Diane Baker (who played the senator in Silence of the Lambs) is Crawford's daughter. Castle had an eye for young beauty. The cast is full of has-beens and would-bes, as any great B-movie will be.

A fun way to close the year out, with my final observation is that, by age, had Crawford been born in the '60s, she'd be starring in Babygirl today.

I prefer my actress to be raised cage-free.