Not a lot of movies this month; I had to leave the house a lot. At home there was a lot of music, Milwaukee Brewers baseball, and those History Channel shows where movie stars who have aged out of action roles present assorted fringe content. I know it’s lowbrow craptainment, but unlike the “high value” offerings of the European cultural broadcaster, it never disappoints.
(I am now unsure if I should write “arte” or “ARTE”, as they refer to themselves in all-caps but the logo is all lowercase. eh. I don’t have to listen to them, they’re not my cat.)
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)
arte Mediathek, original English
arte had been good to me lately, so I trusted them when they recommended a “Jeff Daniels/Clint Eastwood buddy road trip comedy.” My mistake. The pair become buddies, a bank robber and a drifter thrown together in rural Idaho, and after they run into some other robbers chasing Eastwood for their cut of a previous score, they settle down into a small city and it turns into a heist film. At that point, I was mostly watching to see if the white polyester pants Daniels’ character stole ever got dirty while they were running around the dusty backroads. Not really a spoiler: they don’t. He keeps those white pants clean until he buys some jeans. Crazy.
Nice scenery, an early appearance from Daisy Duke, interesting fashion (Daniels does some cross-dressing, as it was called at the time), cool cars, and Eastwood did some of his own stunts, but it was a slog. George Kennedy wasn’t funny and only one of the sex scenes drove the plot. Unsurprisingly, the film was such a flop Eastwood never made a movie for United Artists ever again.
Include it in your Daniels or Eastwood retrospective, but there’s really no other reason to watch it.
Mildly interesting: The German title of this film is Die Letzten Beißen die Hunde, The Last Bite the Dogs, a phrase that did not appear in the original English dialog.
Superman (1978)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
The first time I saw this one I was sitting on the couch recovering from surgery on my broken hand, and I thought it was OK but I didn’t need to see it again. I don’t always get to pick the movie.
This time I was struck by how it seems to be two completely different movies. The first half, on Krypton, is a drama with monologues about metaphysics and then the second is cheesy comic action/adventure. Even Cookie Monster noticed this.
Story was dumb; Reeves was gorgeous; the Krypton sets and effects were nice. Maybe it’s better if you grew up with it when it was fresh.
La Vie En Rose (2007)
arte Mediathek, Deutsch
And now for something completely different, a biopic of the iconic French singer Édith Piaf, starring the extremely versatile French actress Marion Cotillard, who won a Best Actress Oscar* for her performance. I thought the makeup team also should have won: they did a crazy amazing job making her look old and sick in the scenes from the last few years of Piaf’s life.
And her life was hard. Her father parked her with her grandmother in a brothel when she was a few years old, then took her away to force her to work, first in a circus and then on the street. She gets discovered later by a nightclub owner, and then given a chance to sing in a “real” concert hall. This story is mostly chronological, punctuated by the story of the end of her life, and despite the brilliance of the sets, the music, the performance, the makeup, the “mostly” made it hard to watch. The scenes of Piaf’s life from 1960 to her death in fall 1963 are not presented in order, they bounce from her deathbed to her planning a comeback and back. It was confusing, and sorting out where we were in the story distracted from what was happening on the screen.
Also hard to watch were the many scenes of Piaf losing people she loved to one circumstance to another, and all the grief expressed, but those are the scenes that earned Cotillard all the acclaim (plus, they were all true).
But I really liked the soundtrack; most scenes were accompanied by actual recordings of Piaf performing a song from the time/place the scenes were taking place, or inspired by them. That’s how you do a biopic.
*She also won the African-American Film Critics Association’s Best Actress award in 2007. FWIW.
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
Paramount+, original English
Everything I said last time, except this time I was recovering from surgery and it hurt to laugh. Also mad props to Reggie Jackson.
Fun fact: The guy who plays Al played professional basketball in Austria before hitting Hollywood.
The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991)
Paramount+, original English
I know I saw this one in a theater with friends in high school. Did not enjoy it as much on this rewatch, and I’m not sure why; possibly the aforementioned pain, possibly because it was the work of just one Zucker and he needed his brother and their friend to make the real magic.
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