You remember last month, when I said I was unfamiliar with Margaret Keane and her paintings of creepy big-eyed children before I saw her biopic? Here’s a fourth-season episode of ALF that randomly presented itself to me while I was sitting under my cat downloading podcasts. I don’t need this synchronicity right now, thank you.
Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (1970)
arte Mediathek, Deutsch
Covered in Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group B.
Histoires extraordinaires à faire peur ou à faire rire… (1949)
Netflix, original French with English subtitles
Covered in Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group D.
Cold November (2018)
Netflix, original Albanian with English subtitles
Covered in Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group B.
The Diviners (2019)
takflix, original Ukrainian and Russian with English subtitles
Covered in Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group E.
Keep scrolling, there’s actual text coming up. And pictures! Lots of pictures!
Brabançonne (2014)
Netflix, original Flemish with English subtitles
Covered in Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group E.
Mädchenjahre einer Königin (1954)
Netflix, original Deutsch
Covered in Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group D.
Ask Taktikleri (2022)
Netflix, English
See Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group F.
Galaxy Quest (1999)
Netflix, original English
Palate cleanser; also it was the last day to watch it on Netflix and I had never seen it before. I’m sad about that, I grokked all the references–both from Star Trek, and from assorted friends and cow-orkers through the years–and it was very well made, good story, fun time. Nostalgic computer hardware. Can re-watch.
The original official website was archived by the Wayback Machine, but I haven’t been able to get at it yet.
Povestea unui pierde-vara (2018)
Netflix, original Romanian with English subtitles
Group E.
Tuintje in mijn hart (2017)
Netflix, original Dutch with English subtitles
Covered in Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group D.
Little Kingdom (2019)
Netflix, original English
Group E.
Three Amigos! (1986)
Amazon Prime, original English
Palate cleanser, from the My Parents Steadfastly Refused To Let Me Watch Anything All My Peers Were Watching Collection, although probably because my dad hates Steve Martin more than because of the content. If I take a step back, though, I definitely would not have found the opening act, or the painted studio sets, as funny in eighth grade as I did after four years of watching silent films and classic Westerns on arte.
Much of the dialog was familiar from high school, but I am angry at everyone I have ever met for not showing me the sewing scene.
Will watch again.
Dvoboj za Juznu prugu (1978)
Amazon Prime, Deutsch
Finally something from Group C.
Next of Kin (1989)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
Everything I said last time, but this time I really envy Truman his family back in Kentucky. My Iowa family decided they didn’t want any more extended-family gatherings after my grandma died, and I don’t have any contact to my cousins except a couple who post pics of grandkids and vacations on FB. This is not a good way to live.
AND there’s a scene where G’Kar is making sauce in his Italian restaurant and he starts rubbing the oregano in his hands that made me crave Bolognese. Someday it won’t be too hot to make real food, then it’s on.
Feed Me with Your Words (2012)
YouTube, original Slovenian with English subtitles
Group C.
Rehragout-Rendezvous (2023)
Frontenhausen, May 2024
ARD, original Bavarian with German subtitles
The ninth movie of the Eberhofer-Birkenberger cozy murder-mystery franchise (read about six of them here; number seven here; number eight here). After being disappointed last summer, I kept my expectations low. Lots of good physical comedy, and I laughed more than expected, but again the crime and its solution felt tacked-on and half-assed. Props for using the Pfadfinders (German scouts, both boys and girls) to comb a field looking for shredded human remains.
As happens in every long-running franchise, the actors are aging faster than the story can be filmed. For most of the characters–grandmothers, mayors, plumbers, weird neighbors–this isn’t an issue. But Suzi is starting to look mutton dressed as lamb. Lisa Maria Pothoff is stunning for her age, but the age gap is getting too long to be credibly mitigated. (Speaking of, murder-by-manure-tank seems to have been lifted from an earlier Pothoff film, Maria Mafiosi, which was released four years before the book, and surely I’m not the first person to notice?)
The tenth film will be in theaters next year, so watch this space in summer of 2026!
Lisinski (1944)
YouTube, original Croatian with English subtitles
Covered in Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group B.
It’s all new words from here on down!
Headin’ Home (1920)
YouTube, original English
Babe Ruth’s first film; he plays himself in a fictionalized origin story, co-starring a kid sister and her dog, a townful of assholes, and a blonde who starts to run away with a con man before deciding to stick around and wait for him to come back from the bigs. It’s hokey, but it’s a great time capsule (with real footage of him playing a real game with the Yankees, if you like that sort of thing). There was a touching bit where a couple dozen kids with paralyzed from polio crutch themselves into the park to watch the game between the team that refused to let Babe play, and the rival town who pulled him in last-minute. You think you hate the people out to destroy all human progress enough, but you really don’t.
Babe hits a home run five blocks out of the park with a bat he carved himself, clearly inspiring Bernard Malamud’s Roy Hobbs (Malamud was six years old when this movie came out…).
Nice distraction from Yeli’s persistent back injury. The sort of movie you can watch while sitting outside waiting for it to be dark enough to open all the windows and go to bed, without having to worry about your brain whizzing all night long from the plot or dialog or special effects.
Der Glockenkrieg (1981)
Bayerischer Rundfunk, original Bavarian with German subtitles
A rewatch–it was still on the DVR–ahead of a tour on film and TV locations in Freising. I found it easier to understand after my intensive Bavarian language and culture studies, and I’m intrigued by the superstition at the heart of the conflict: that by ringing the church bells during bad weather, the storm can be steered away from the church and the town that surrounds it. (The movie was not mentioned on my tour, and I couldn’t find a specific building or landscape shot to ask about, so the mystery remains.)
Hey, isn’t that: Young trumpet-playing Schorsch grows up to be the mayor of Lansing in Oberbayern, and still recognizable after 25 years.
Das blaue Licht (1976)
MDR, original German
An East German adaptation of a classic Grimm Brothers tale, it’s got everything you want in a kid’s flick: binge drinking until blackout, public hanging, a little light D/S play. OTOH, Disney can never yank this one out of the public domain because smoking tobacco is an essential driver of plot. Which kind of brings me to the whole point of watching the old DEFA fairy tale films: they stayed true to the original story and didn’t drop any good ol’ Young Pioneers propaganda into it (the king is cruel and dishonest, yes, but that’s straight out of the Brothers’ original post-Napoleonic manuscript).
I didn’t particularly care for the story, but this was an academic watch. Interesting costumes, and good sets.
Destination Moon (1950)
YouTube, original English
It’s based on a Heinlein novel I have not read, but he wrote the first draft of the screenplay so I assume it’s a good adaptation. It was also very technical, and very dry. There was a “beer, babes, and baseball” mechanic from Brooklyn who may have been intended as comic relief, but his schtick got real grating real fast. True to the genre, they get to the moon, then have a drama trying to get back home.
The rocket’s interior reminded me of the rocket from Frau im Mond, which I think was the better movie (note to self: what happened to resolution to watch more Thea von Harbou?).
The best part: our moon-nauts gather rich and powerful heads of industry into a room to watch Woody Woodpecker explain how thrust propulsion works.
The Unholy Three (1925)
arte, original English (title cards)
Lon Cheney, Mae Busch, and one Harry Earles, a circus performer who gave up movies in 1930 but came back to play a Munchkin along with his three sisters. Cheney plays a side-show ventriloquist who hatches a plan to get more money faster through robbery, and enlists a strongman, a cute-girl pickpocket, and Tweedledee, who is a grown-ass man but looks like a toddler into his scheme. He cross-dresses into “Mrs O’Grady”, an elderly exotic bird dealer to sell parrots to rich people, then cases their homes with her “grandbaby” when they call to complain that the birds don’t talk. The system worked, until it didn’t: the strongman kills someone during a robbery, and the police are focused on the bird shop. Easy new plan: they frame their normie sales guy (who is in love with the girl, of course). Spoiler alert: To get to the requisite happy ending, they need a giant chimpanzee.
This was the latest restoration from the former Lobster Films, with a new 2023 score. MORE! FASTER!
Swing Shift (1984)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
I know I promised to never do math again, but we’re farther from this movie than this movie was from V-J Day…nice pic about women who went to work making airplanes in WWII, and how they were treated by their friends/husbands/neighbors/employers. I take some umbrage with Goldie Hawn’s costumes: She was never shown wearing the same outfit twice, and I don’t know how a woman living alone would have gotten so many ration coupons. There were also a lot of women wearing loose and drape-y sleeves and open floppy coats on the factory floor, and I don’t believe actual women were so blase about the risk of losing an arm in a machine.
But I was impressed that they cast Patty Maloney and Susan Peretz as completely normal working women, without making any big deal out of their appearance. The past was not as bleak as the current crop of child weirdos pretend it was.
Also note: Orange cat drinking the water out of a plant pot.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
We’re definitely into “stuff people say they like because they’re told they should like it” territory here. Five Oscars, beloved by professional critics and film students, and completely god-awful. There’s no plot, there’s no story, there’s no character development: there’s just four drunk people–two university professors and their wives–yelling insults at each other for two hours, occasionally escalating into physical violence. Not even clever or funny insults, just vicious and emotionally abusive. The whole time, I was waiting for the *click*–see A Big Hand for the Little Lady–that never came.
Silver lining: Got to see Elizabeth Taylor eating roasted chicken out of the refrigerator in the middle of the night. That’s one of my favorite tropes.
The Lost Boys (1987)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
In my daily doomscrolling, I saw a half-dozen different people post that July 31 is the release date of The Lost Boys. It was moldering on the DVR for my next bout of vampyritis, and the weather is crappy and I had a sinus infection, so let’s rewatch something easy.
I laughed so hard I woke up the cat when Haim tells big-bro Patric he’s a prisoner of his own glands, because that’s pretty much my review from 2021. Mostly, I was concentrating on the aesthetics. So many sparkly and drape-y fabrics, and Marko’s coat is amazing. Music even better than I remember (somehow I missed the saxophone player last time, but I knew to look for him from this article I read a few months ago while looking up something else.)
Plumbing special effects were kind of hokey, but in general, I liked it more this watch. Maybe it’s all the terrible movies I’ve seen over the intervening years.
