Outside, three straight weeks of cold rain. Inside, three weeks of some sort of bronchitis-y thing. What can you do? FYI, I broke out the Good Friday Banned Films into a separate post.
April 2023
Alexander (2004)
Warner Film, original English
About halfway through a twenty-minute battle scene with crowds of CGI, I started to wonder if I really would rather read a book about ancient Macedonia instead. It took two afternoons, but I did finish it. Mostly for the lavish sets, costumes, and scenery shots; the emphasis on “showcasing his bisexuality”, which I understand was controversial at the film’s release, was boring.
Casting a woman the same age as the lead character to play his clingy mother ended up making much of the movie creepy and weird–and I thought that before learning Angelina Jolie demanded her costumes be made sexier than actual women of her character’s time and place wore.
Surviving Picasso (1996)
arte, Deutsch
arte celebrated the 50th Todestag (death anniversary) of Picasso with a day of films, both long and short, mostly documentary, most of which I am not going to click on because I would rather watch baseball than interpretive dance. But this film about Françoise Gilot, the only one of his mistresses who managed to stand up to him, stars Anthony Hopkins, and that piqued my interest. Françoise is played by Natascha McElhone, David Duchovny’s long-suffering companion from Californication. Definitely colored my view of her performance here, even though that role was ten years later…
This is a real artist bio-pic *cough*, well-made, nice costumes, filmed on locations, some art theory talk and a visit with Matisse, but depressing. I knew Picasso was an asshole, but he was *really* an asshole. Towards the beginning of their relationship, a small cat gets carried off to be eaten by a hawk, a cringingly obvious metaphor, and it goes down from there.
Guys I knew I’d seen somewhere before: Picasso’s eldest son (born the same year as Françoise) is Netflix’s Prince Charles and Françoise’s father is the game warden from Jurassic Park. Also–and I did not know this until the end credits–the screenplay was based on a book written by that Huffington woman who didn’t pay her writers. FWIW.
Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), and Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Warner Film, original English
Our cable dropped these (and the third, which we chose not to see) on consecutive Friday nights; Mr Radish had seen them many times, but the first two are Classic 80s Films I Wasn’t Allowed To See. Some of the dialog was very familiar from “forty years of cites, references, parodies, and praise”, but I enjoyed watching them.
The ending on the second film was incomplete: We don’t see Jones clawing the stuffing out of Ripley as punishment for leaving.
Name shouting during the opening credits: Hey, that’s Cassandra Spender! EL CHUPACABRA VIVE! Good times, good times.
A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969)
ARD one, Deutsch
I have no conscious memories of seeing this film as a child, although I must have seen the shortened version that was shown on CBS in the late 70s/early 80s. There’s a sequence where Schroeder plays Beethoven’s Pathetique to a montage of still photos of Vienna that was beautiful, and haunting, and most certainly axed for children’s televsion.
Dubbed movies are always interesting. Words in 21st-century animations can be easily redrawn for foreign release. The hand-drawn cells of Charlie Brown learning spelling words in his room were not re-drawn. So he’s chanting German spelling rules about S and CH, while English rules about I before E scrolled across my screen. Crazy.
Victor/Victoria (1982)
Warner Film, original English
Julie Andrews’ last Oscar nomination; she plays a woman pretending to be a male “female impersonator”, as the protégé of an older gay man who works in the cabaret business in 1930s Paris. I expect this one to be memory-holed, as the men who wear dresses call themselves “men” and “female impersonators” instead of insisting clothing transmutes them into something they are not. And the drag performances had no children present or giant rubber genitalia on the stage, just elegant costumes, brilliant vocals–an aging Robert Preston still delivered in one take–and subtle innuendo for adults. (The film was rated PG.) The past is truly another planet.
Anyway, about halfway through I realized I was viewing this as an historical document and not an entertainment, which is kind of sad because it’s a good movie, well-cast (Webster’s Dad is James Garner’s bodyguard), well-costumed, funny jokes, good physical comedy. The songs went longer than I like, but that’s me being a grump.
And my thanks to Poseidon for reminding me Andrews had previously starred with James Garner in The Americanization of Emily (great biography at this link). Completely slipped my mind.
The Byzantine Cat (2002)
Netflix, English
Seems IMDB users didn’t like this Russian film about a young rich British woman engaged to a race-car driver who calls herself a “journalist” going on a quick trip to Cyprus (her mother’s homeland) before her wedding and getting rescued by a trapeze artist from a small traveling circus after the party yacht she’s on crashes. As one does. This is standard chick-lit, guys, just filmed on locations–some quite stunning–and featuring actors with actual human teeth.
I did want it to have more cats, though. While looking for a story to bring back to London, our protagonist Jane (good British Jane) visits an Orthodox monastery with a lot of cats, and one called Vesta seeks her out. Vesta shows up periodically throughout the movie to amuse and “protect” Jane…except when she got on the boat with the drunken driver, must have been Vesta’s breakfast time. Predictably, trapeze artist Andrey can’t believe how beautiful the unconscious woman he fished out of the ocean is, leaving his existing girlfriend Wanda a bit in the lurch (she’ll be OK; the Cypriot who brought the circus to his village has a thing for her, and wins her over in the end). Meanwhile, search-and-rescue doesn’t know Jane is alive and staying with the circus and informs her mother in England. Oops. Vesta does show up when Wanda tries to murder Jane, and then wanders back off again.
At the end, the race-car driver accepts her decision to break off with him, but Mother throws a fit about Andrey’s lack of money, which I don’t understand as she is “jet off at a moment’s notice and offer £100k rewards for information” rich herself, and Jane is her only heir. As they’re on a boat to Athens to apologize to her also-rich relatives for canceling the wedding, Andrey makes the greatest grand gesture I have ever seen in a chick-lit film: He flies over and carries her off into the sunset in his paramotor. I mean, if Adam Sandler does that to Aniston, it becomes an instant classic.
It’s not Great Cinema, but it was cute, and I enjoyed seeing some Cypriot culture as it was twenty years ago and may not exist anymore; same with the small Russian circus.
It just needed more cats.
Weirdness: The top credited actor is in the film for one short scene in London.
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
arte Mediathek, Deutsch
Synchronization diminished the experience. An all-star cast from several countries all speaking the same accent-free German? I couldn’t distinguish Michael Caine from Hardy Kruger from James Caan. C’mon, man.
Anyway, three-hour WWII epic, based on the true story of Operation Market Garden, an Allied push through Belgium and the Netherlands. It’s a very good movie, but heavy subject matter (as the title alludes, the operation was not completely successful); you will be introduced to characters you like only to see them violently cut down. There is a scene where a British soldier plays a flute for some injured men…and later he is shown with his hand blown off.
And this is all real.
I did spend some of the battle scenes and explosions thinking less about the horrors of WWII and more about how the film was being shot without CGI. You only get the one take when the whole building goes up in flames, right? Where can I learn about this stuff?
Hey, isn’t that…?!: Cliff Claven.
Otto’s Eleven (2009)
Netflix, original Deutsch
More than twenty years after his first film, German comedian Otto put together this parody of Ocean’s Eleven (I have only seen the original with Frank Sinatra and Mr Roper) that I quite enjoyed. Otto lives with four weird friends–all played by other comedians I knew from earlier films and/or LOL–on a tiny lonely island in the Nordsee. A family heirloom painting is stolen by a rich casino owner posing as a tourist; the five hatch a plan to get it back. Along the way they pick up some romantic interests and a dog–ending up with a gang of Eleven.
Post-watch research tells me men who enjoyed Otto’s work in the 70s and 80s hate this movie because there were too many impressions and sketches breaking up the “action”, and he does too many of his old signature gags. I enjoyed the impressions and sketches–UHF, BABY!–and even understood most of them without outside help; as a n00b I was delighted that I recognized his silly walk as “Otto’s silly walk” when another character performed it. (What’s the point of having a signature gag if you can’t use it?)
Mephisto (1981)
DVD (library), Deutsch
The first time I saw this movie, it was in a red envelope, and I was lugging a ToughBook through the Philadelphia airport on an 11-hour layover, and it had English subtitles because I only knew a handful of words of German. So long ago, WiFi was only available in the food court, not at the gates. I remember really enjoying it, and had been thinking about looking for it again when it popped up in the arte Mediathek with subtitles…and then popped back out before I got a chance to see it.
On a lark, I dug through the library’s collection of six copies of each season of The Mentalist (why?) DVDs until I found an ancient “Classic Selection” release at the back of the bin, no subtitles or special features–the “internet piracy is bad” sketch that played before the main menu showed Windows 98. Clearly no attempt to interest anyone younger than myself in this film…which is unfortunate, as it touches on the very 2023 themes of individuals compromising their personal integrity to serve a totalitarian society and the use of cultural institutions as transmitters of government propaganda. The screenplay is based on a 1936 novel based on a true story that was banned in West Germany in the 1970s (but importable from East Germany, huh), and directed by the Hungarian István Szabó, who wrote and directed Sunshine.
The film wasn’t shown in either Germany until after it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film; East German television showed it first. Fascinating.
The main character, Hendrik (played by Austrian stage actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, you recognize him from Out of Africa), is an actor, cabaret dancer, and Bolshevist in Hamburg in the early 1930s. He’s clearly already mentally ill, the film opens with him having a psychotic break in a dressing room, but he’s driven to become the best actor in all of Germany. He’s banging his Afro-Deutsch dance teacher, marrying a blonde “People’s Theater” colleague with a rich industrialist father, working constantly, and eventually outgrows the Hamburg theater scene and gets a gig in Berlin. After the appointment of a new National Socialist Chancellor, his wife and several colleagues flee to Paris, but he wants to act in Germany, doing German plays in the German language, and stays.
His performance as the devil Mephisto in Faust catches the eye of the “Ministerpräsident“–obviously Goering, even though no names of actual historical figures are used in the script–and the two men develop a symbiotic, although inherently unequal, relationship. Hendrik is appointed to lead the Prussian State Theater, putting on government-approved plays with staging and costuming to promote the Ministerpräsident’s ideals. His Black mistress is granted an exit visa with the condition that he stop seeing her; his wife has been writing for a newspaper opposing the regime, so he divorces her to keep his theater leadership position, and marries an actress active in the Party.
While starring in a production of Hamlet alongside his new wife, Hendrik realizes people are applauding his political connections and not his acting, that he is actually Faust and not Mephisto, and sold his soul for nothing. The film ends with him having another, possibly final, psychotic break.
I liked it better the first time (I may have missed some nuance; Brandauer has a very pronounced Styrian accent, annoying when the character’s north German identity is so important to him), when it was purely an historical film. Hendrik is also very misogynist, even as a Bolshevik; he clearly didn’t disagree with all of the regime’s ideas, and this undermines the punch at the end.
And there was too much interpretive dance.
I have to think about this one some more.
Shaft (1971)
Warner Film, original English
A classic of American film, and deservedly so. Really great music in this one.
(Link for no reason.)
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