This Week in Geek (27/05-02/06/19)

Buys

I got myself a FIND YOUR JOY shirt of my own design, available at TeePublic for fans of geekwear.

"Accomplishments"

In theaters: Godzilla, King of the Monsters is huge, it's epic, it's massive spectacle, it's completely bonkers the way a Godzilla film should be, and on the kaiju end of things, it is nearly unimpeachable. I still long for photo-real GZ and co. in bright daylight - the action is drenched in rain, ash and night, like the previous film - especially after Skull Island, but the image making is still quite strong. The movie doesn't skimp on giant monster battles (even if the trope of Godzilla showing up in the nick of time whenever a character is about to be eaten is used laughably often) and there's definitely a thrill from seeing King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan, and yes, others, in the American franchise for the first time. Lots of references to the old movies, including, FINALLY, the original Godzilla music (why did the previous production think it wouldn't work?!). Where it falls down on the job is the human story. At a nuts and bolts level, the first two acts are smothered in action movie clichés, and the MacGuffin is right out of last year's Rampage. Things are over-explained because apparently the audience is dumb, but other things are unclear and desperately need an explanation, or at least a bit more directorial finessing. A couple of important deaths are so badly presented, you sort of have to realize they happened after the fact. So never you mind the humano-centric plotting, the boring dialog, or the uneven acting (seems to me, Vera Farminga is too good an actress to look like she's reading cue cards). When the monsters are on screen, it's pretty great, and there are a lot of very cool KER-POW - sorry, SKREEONNNK! - moments. And that's why I see these films anyway.

My one-word, capitalized review of Booksmart is RELATABLE! You won't be surprised to read, I imagine, that I was academically-focused in school, and not so great with the social interactions. The story of these two girls, who feel like they wasted their youth studying and who embark on a Superbad-type graduation's eve night of partying to catch themselves up, may be told from a completely different generation than mine's point of view, but the feelings behind it are pretty universal. I don't even think the relatability is limited to bookworms or teens. Some of the moments I felt best resonated with me happened in college, or as an adult, perhaps even in the last few years. Regret, social anxiety, unfairness, these are themes that stay with us. As a comedy, Booksmart has a little of everything. Amusing characters, a bit of gross-out humor (but only a bit), smart dialog, truthful observations, fun directorial bears courtesy of Olivia Wilde, completely absurd moments, and at the center of it all, a lovely friendship with a lot of heart. I would be totally into catching up with Molly and Amy in college if the right story were to come up. They're my people.

At home: The Perfection is twisty-turny, lurid little horror-thriller that's filled with surprises, set in the world of high-end classical music, with Allison Williams (Girls) and Logan Browning (Dear White People) excellent as top-tier cellists who connect and go on a dark journey. The movie keeps you guessing, and though my guesses were often proven correct, I can't say I predicted the completed picture, and there's a lot of enjoyment to be had besides from the interesting editing, sound and camera work. The rewind flashback reveals aren't part of the lot, however. There, I felt like the film wasn't trusting its audience to put two and two together, and was undermining its own replay value. So without getting into the details, I will say The Perfection works as a crazy EC Comics-type tale that uses music well, has a couple of visceral thrills and very cool visual moments, and has its cast of characters switch readily between hero, villain and victim in a pleasant way. I kind of want to see Williams and Browning on the non-horror take on the initial premise, I will admit.

Kristy McNichol has an irrepressibly cute girl next door persona in Just the Way You Are, an early 80s romcom that has the distinction of featuring a disabled heroine. McNichol plays a flutist with a sparkly personality and a leg brace, but for all her feelings of being an ugly duckling because of the latter, she's almost literally swimming in men. On a European trip where she hopes to be discovered, she finally has had enough with the awkward stares, and decides to "pass" as normatively abled, go on a ski trip and get a cast fitted so she only appears injured. You can imagine the romantic complications down the line. Yes, it changes how people see her, but what it mostly does is remove her self-imposed inhibitions, if not exactly making her a better person. The film is actually quite smart in presenting disability and the psychology surrounding it, and as a romance, it's really quite sweet. On the production end, it looks and feels like a TV movie, which is kind of too bad, but it has merit nonetheless.

Niagara is Marilyn Munro's first color film, a Technicolor noir in fact, and she's so resplendent, it was then in her contract that she couldn't ever appear again in black and white (Some Like It Hot the one exception, but it WAS shot in color - making the boys in drag look monstrous apparently). Gorgeous though she is, she also shows range by playing a femme fatale that's both hard as nails, and haunted and vulnerable, a woman trying to get her boyfriend to kill her husband at everyone's favorite honeymoon destination: Niagara Falls. The location is very well used, not just as backdrop and opportunity for visual beauty and dangerous waters, but for its symbolic resonance as well. In those most powerful of falls, we find the plot's deadly inevitability, and Munroe's turmoil and beauty both. It's very well done, though once the worst has happened, I don't much care for the tagged-on action sequence. Or rather, everything I care about is done. Still, Jean Peters makes a good heroine in those scenes. FAVORITE OF THE WEEK

Laurence Olivier is an inventive director, but that side of him is pretty restrained, if not entirely repressed, in The Prince and the Showgirl, in which he plays a Carpathian regent at odds with his royal son and befuddled by an irrepressible Marilyn Munroe as the title showgirl, an American with ideas of her own. That the two characters would ever fall in love is laughable - he's using his position to get one-night stands and she knows it - but it really does work as an anti-romcom, where by turns, the leads use seduction strategies to get what they want, and an anti-fairy tale, with the aristocracy satirized throughout. The showgirl thinks it's all very fancy, but it isn't an ambition of hers. The way the proposed one-night stand is extended is absurd and extremely amusing, and it's interesting to see Munroe in a period piece too. Given its contrary nature, I can see why the film isn't one of Munroe's best-regarded films (though she's great as usual), but it touched my own sensibilities, thank you very much.

Princess from the Moon is the live action version the The Tale of Princess Kaguya, or at least, is based on the same folk tale. The later anime is a standard Kon Ichikawa's 1987 film can't hope to attain, as it's a masterpiece, but it has beautiful cinematography and charms of its own. It shows its 80s-ness in the thankfully rare special effects and the terrible pop tune over the end credits, but otherwise, has a timeless, fairy tale look. Until you get to the sci-fi twist in which the gods are replaced with aliens, that is. If it had been just a TOUCH more ambiguous, it would have worked. A modern audience could have taken the talk of people and ships as anything. The "moon" could have been a magical or alien place. But the sight of a Spielbergian flying saucer, very definitely technology, gives too definitive and jarring an answer. Well, one man's science is another man's magic, right? It's not that big a problem, but I did find it both unnecessary and silly to make that change no matter how "hot" sci-fi was at the time.

The 1953 film adaptation of the the Broadway hit Kiss Me Kate (no comma) is a perfectly amusing musical in which a pair of ex-spouses play opposite one another in a production of a Taming of the Shrew musical, which is pleasantly meta and I think sort of justifies the cast sometimes looking into camera or throwing stuff at it to create a 3D experience (yep, it was filmed in wall-breaking 3D). For Howard Keel, it's yet another sexist role out of which to belt Broadway hits. Kathryn Grayson gives a spirited performance opposite him and brings out I think the most sympathetic part of him. The amount of behind-the-scenes shenanigans that take place DURING the big show is of course patently ridiculous, and it means that the play within the play is probably unwatchable (as a theater goer, I was nitpicking the fictional show quite a lot), and I do wish there was more to it because all the best bits and songs are in the show itself. Though it's cool to see a young Bob Fosse dance a very Fosse number in there somewhere, some of the dancing could have been switched out with a scene or two to help flesh out Kate's transformation. As is, while we may be happy with the way the actors' stories turned out, the characters in the play are ill-served and so is Shakespeare himself. To quote my friend Nath while watching this: "'I Hate Men' is a mood."

The 1930s loved its jungle movies, and they're all pretty difficult to watch today because of how the "primitives" are portrayed. Sometimes, the jungle is the Arctic, and he same problem crops up with Inuit characters. That's really Petticoat Fever's only crime, as Robert Montgomery is too goofy to be any kind of real threat despite not being able to take "no" from Myrna Loy's stranded pilot. Movie's not woke is what I'm sayin'. If it flies at all, it's thanks to genial performances from the two leads, and every objection we might have to their relationship (would Myrna really want to live in Nowhere, Labrador? does she actually love her foot-stamping fiancé? does Montgomery love his own?) are dispelled by various plot contrivances. It's silly fluff, and completely harmless in intent, even if the execution shows the era's biases. I do find it questionable that Montgomery doesn't even try to have a British accent when he's meant to be from the UK (which owned Labrador at the time).

Ah, here's one of those jungle pictures... Too Hot to Handle teams Myrna Loy up with frequent co-star Clark Gable, her as a daring pilot, he as a daredevil newsreel journalist. It's pretty exciting, actually. Not QUITE a jungle picture - only the last act really concerns an Amazon expedition for Loy's long-lost brother - when it does get there, it's a bit more authentic than most. Oh, the natives aren't portrayed in the best light (nor are the Chinese, earlier), but the some of the cultural footage is at least real even if most other scenes are populated by African American extras. But that's a relatively small part of the film, and admittedly the weakest. Much stronger is the stuff about Gable's journalist "staging" news footage, sabotaging competing cameramen, and yet, being quite able to put himself in danger and getting the goods when he gets the chance. He's a rascal and a con man, but he's certainly good at his job in an action man kind of way. Loy's Amelia Earhart stand-in takes a second seat to him on occasion, but despite a frequent lack of agency, she still cuts a fine heroic (and romantic) figure. So it's good fun, and not entirely dated aside from the way non-Americans are portrayed.

The Heavenly Body is an amusing trifle the likes of which William Powell more or less specialized in, about the wife of an astronomer (she's played by an earnest and beautiful Hedy Lamarr) who starts to doubt his commitment to her because he works nights and is never around/awake. She goes to an astrologer (get it?) who tells her she is about to meet her true soul mate, creating amusingly absurd marital problems for Powell. From our point of view, the astronomer's heart is always in his marriage, he just hasn't been very good at proving it, and we'll soon see how he puts his wife ahead of his work after all... if the stars can stop their meddling! Along the way, plenty of distractions, from crazy Russian house parties to cometary special effects, maybe even a song or two. Nothing to necessarily write home about, but the movie's two stars are charming and cute, and they make this slim piece of fluff quite watchable.

Le Coup du Berger (AKA Checkmate but better translated as Fool's Mate, though literally the Shepherd's) is a 28-minute short from the "father of the French New Wave" Jacques Rivette that essentially plays as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents without the murder. Referencing a chess move any beginner will have fallen for at least once (I relate), in which the queen and a bishop (in French, a fool) are used to checkmate the opponent in very few moves. The intrigue: A woman gets an expensive gift from her lover and faces the problem of how to keep it without her husband asking too many questions. Her gambit is clever, but is her husband, in fact, a beginner? Or is she the fool and he the mate implied by the title rather than the opposite? Or in French, who is leading (shepherding) whom, or does the sheep stray? Though it's a cerebral little film typical of the New Wave (of which some say this is the first example), it provides a fun puzzle. Fans of cinema may further derive some enjoyment from spotting New Wave adepts like Cabrol, Truffaut and Godard as background extras in the party scene.

Based on an Italian comics series (which may explain why it's bananas and episodic), Danger: Diabolik is a spaghetti heist picture that asks, What if Bond were a Bond villain? And then gave it a bit of a 60s art house treatment for good measure. Are you ready for a deep deep dive? (Won't get that song out of my head anytime soon.) So Diabolik is a super-thief, staging impossible heists with his sexy lover Eva from his Ken Adam-style sci-fi HQ, while both the police and the gangsters who would trade him in for their own freedom all try to nab him. Visually inventive, Diabolik doesn't really have likable characters to hang your interest on, it's just cool and fun. A bit repetitive, I'll admit, which is to say it gets less and less interesting as it goes along, but recaptures one's interest at the very end, I think. Sometimes you want to watch a movie that you can't believe got made. This is one of those movies. Thanks, Italy!

You can definitely tell the original Pink Panther film wasn't meant to be a slapstick comedy. Peter Sellers was cast late as the clumsy and hapless Inspector Clouseau, and the entire tone of the film changed. For the better, in one sense, spawning a veritable franchise (albeit a weird one, as the Panther neither refers to the policeman nor the thief, but the jewel the latter is after). But what's good for movie history isn't necessarily so for the film itself. Sellers steals the show with his brand of physical comedy, but he's in a supporting role which means you're often sitting around waiting for one of his scenes. The convoluted caper requires Clouseau's wife to be one of the villains, cheating on him with the criminal Phantom, and because our hearts are with the clueless inspector, it makes the plot seem entirely too cruel. If this had been a movie about David Niven's gentleman thief, it might not be remembered as much, but it wouldn't have suffered from tonal changes and might have been a more consistent genre film. As is, it's neither as slick as a Niven picture should be, nor as funny as a Sellers picture should be.

For 1982, Victor/Victoria is pretty woke. We're immediately plunged into the world of "Gay" Paree in the 1930s, a world of drag queens and gentleman's clubs, and it all feels very true to life (life in the 80s, at least). Julie Andrews is a down-on-her-luck opera singer who gets roped into becoming Europe's greatest female impersonator, but things get complicated for her when man's man James Garner falls for her before her on-stage reveal that she is a man. From then on, while the setting itsef is steeped in gay culture, the film really becomes about male fragility. Garner has an existential crisis trying to reconcile his brief moment of attraction for another man, and the story unfortunately shies away from having him kiss Victor while still unsure of the singer's gender. But even after the cat's out of the bag, Victoria puts demands on him that test his homophobic malaise (though the film must eventually resolve its romcom plot in the sadly very usual way). Now, this was directed by Blake Edwards of Pink Panther fame, and it shows. There is a LOT of amusing physical shtick, and it's pretty hard to give the prize for movie's MVP because so many actors do an outstanding job with their comic business, whether they were in the main cast or just day players. I'm going to give it to Leslie Ann Warren as Garner's jilted girlfriend; she's really quite funny. I was expecting more songs, but what's there is good. The movie's "music" is actually more on the dialog end of things, witty banter you'd expect from movies of Hollywood's Golden Age.

The world of Parisian prostitutes and their pimps is tarted up in Irma La Douce, that is to say, it presents a rosy depiction of the underworld where sex workers treat pimps like managers they can fire, and boyfriends they can break off with. But if it wasn't sex positive, Billy Wilder couldn't make the comedy work. There's eventually a dark turn, but nowhere near as dark as what the posters promise, I assure you. Everything about this says "don't take me too seriously" and puts you in a pleasant frame of mind, whether it's Shirley MacLaine's self-possessed street walker who takes pride in her profession, or Jack Lemon in ridiculous British lord drag, or fun support players like the over-qualified bartender Moustache (but that's another story). As colorful as a musical, and as patently ridiculous as Blake Edwards comedy, Irma La Douce is filled to the brim with amusing slapstick, screwball antics, and quirky characters. And the story takes you all sorts of places too. Quite entertaining, wot.

Jean Renoir's La Chienne (The Bitch) starts with a Punch and Judy show presenting the leads as neither heroes, nor villains, just people like you and me. Despite this directorial conceit, the unfolding drama is real, raw, and brutal. Legrand is an unassuming cashier who paints on the weekends, disrespected by colleagues and browbeaten by his wife. He meets and falls for Lulu, a prostitute directed by her pimp, a domineering brute known as Dédé, to siphon money and eventually art from him. If the drama doesn't want you to think of them as heroes, they do all take turns being villains and victims. Each in their own way, they are fools, led down the wrong path by their vices, people making mistakes and paying the price for them. All the relationships are toxic, and any feeling of triumph we might share with them (for example, when Legrand cleverly extricates himself from his wife's domination) is immediately followed by soul crushing events. Renoir said his piece in that opener and then lets the story play out without intruding opinion. His camera is ambivalent and so everything comes as a surprise... a hard slap.

Scarlet Street is Fritz Lang's Hays-Coded Hollywood remake of Renoir's La Chienne, and it comes across as a sanitized version of the story. 14 years of technical advances separate the two films, so Scarlet Street is evidently slicker, has big American actors (thought Edward G. Robinson had too much of an edge to play Legrand/Chris Cross, but my fears were unfounded), and Lang certainly knows how to make the nuts and bolts of the story fit together more seamlessly. In this version, all the motivations are made clear, to the point of being much too on the nose. La Chienne was uglier, nastier, shabbier, more pathetic, and more ambiguous, all of which I miss. The 1945 film made me realize how much of the 1931 original hanged on Janie Marèse's broken Lulu. Joan Bennett is much too headstrong and at one point, seems to want to comfort the audience by claiming Dédé/Johnny would never kill a fly. I don't know how much of the script changes had to do with the censors, nor how I would have felt about it if I hadn't seen La Chienne, but it's only an okay noir that pales in comparison when you can make it.

In The Horse's Mouth, Alec Guinness is a gruff artist just released from prison for some swindler's scheme or other. Half grifter, half truly gifted painter, what appear to be con jobs early on turn out to be his deep desire to translate his artistic vision into large, colorful paintings. And that's really the crux of the piece. Yes, it's full of zany characters, some of them quite mad in any context, leading to amusing, absurd bits. But it's about the art for art's sake, and how ethics can take a back seat to aesthetics when one is pursuing a truly great endeavor. We don't have to agree with the character's amorality, but we can't help but be excited by his passion and recognize the toll he has to pay for it. Whether he succeeds or fails, the artistic process is given voice in blazing speeches and heroic action (I almost called it mock-heroic, but no, I think this actually something of an epic, if one that takes place at the street level). Full of charm and quirkiness and freshness, The Horse's Mouth  also felt true to the artistic process, which is what I demand from art-related films.

Lumet, Mamet, Newman... The Verdict has an embarrassment of riches both behind and in front of the camera, which also includes veterans like James Mason and Jack Warden, and relative newcomers like Charlotte Rampling and (naming him for fun because he's just an extra in the background), Bruce Willis. But while everyone does a good job, it's really Newman's show. He gives an incredible performance (the dry mouth alone...) as an alcoholic attorney who can't possibly win a case against the Catholic Church in Boston, but has nothing else going for him. Well, the case is one of medical malpractice, but by making it a Catholic hospital, a religious resonance is achieved that equates the churches and court houses, laws and morality, and the verdict with a chance at redemption, which isn't without devilish temptation along the way. Newman's soul is in turmoil, and only by doing good can he hope for rest. Setting this nearing the Christmas season (without ever referencing it) isn't just a random choice, is it? Not with Lumet.

The sad thing about Inherit the Wind is that it's still relevant today. The 1960 courtroom drama, based on a 1955 play, based on the true events of the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, changed the names and details, but fictionalized though it was, still used dialog straight from the trial itself. One would hope the actual events weren't so theatrical (the attorneys make so many speeches, the film can skip closing arguments), but they apparently were, right down to the defense surprise-calling the Bible-thumping prosecutor to testify. In 1925, it was about whether or not science and the Bible were irreconcilable (Fundamentalism vs. Modernism). In 1955, it was really about McCarthyism and the thought police of the day. By 1960, it takes a more universal bent and promotes humanism over organized religion. Watching it in 2019, I feel like we have gone back, and the Fundamentalism shown in the film is today's. The arguments are familiar, as are both the fervor of the sincere believers and the hypocrisies of those who would capitalize on it. Even if it were a story only relevant to its time, Inherit the Wind is still an intense drama, featuring a blazing performance by Spencer Tracy as the Clarence Darrow stand-in, and a pretty cool one by Gene Kelly as a snarky reporter through whom we get some cutting comedy as well. The ever-socially conscious director Stanley Kramer brings it all to life beautifully, with some flair here and there, and a lot of texture.

Though I watched the under-performing Doctor Who spin-off Class back when it aired (and reviewed each episode HERE), I only rewatched it on DVD last week. I remember how at first I wasn't all that keen on the odd blend of Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, but within a few episodes, it won me over. I was in fact pretty bummer the series didn't continue, especially given the cliffhangers in the last episode. In rewatching it already sold on the characters, I could better appreciate those early episodes, though there's still something jarring about the Capaldi Doctor's appearance in the first one (though I find it a necessary chapter in his story if only for a tiny bit at the end where his relationship to Coal Hill comes into focus). The DVD set includes talking head behind the scenes featurette material, as well as a large array of deleted scenes. Now I can only wait for Big Finish to get showrunner Patrick Ness to greenlight or script an ending to his story, as all the current audio plays take place within season 1.

If From Time to Time feels and looks like Downton Abbey, it's not just because they share an actor or three, but because the show's creator Julian Fellowes adapted and directed it (a year before Downton premiered, but of course, years after Gosford Park). The story takes place on one of those grand old estates at the close of World War II, when most were being sold off. Alex Etel (Millions) goes there to stay with his grandmother, waiting to hear from his father who is MIA, and as he learns his family history, he sees ghosts, then becomes a ghost himself, being pulled in and out of the house's history to solve its mysteries. The boy has his heroic moments, but he doesn't rob the people of the past of all their agency either, and the film manages to intertwine two stories (one per time period) to satisfying ends. It sometimes approaches corniness, but Maggie Smith and Hugh Bonneville bring so much heart and subtlety to their roles that it's what you mostly remember. For Downton fans, this is an important precursor, and it's interesting to see him tackle this and that for the first time here, but there's also lots he didn't bring into the show, which did take place in a different era.

Set time machine to 1810s England. Keywords: Book adaptation. Aristocrats on grand estates. An atypical girl. Trying to fit into high society.

The 1940 adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice takes a lot of liberties with the material, and if it were a brave or bold direction, I might be more enchanted. But no, everything is designed to be remedially SAFE. A cast of actors too old for their parts, Elizabeth especially. Mister Darcy barely arcing. Pat, happy endings. Collins scored with comedy music, but rather boring all in all. A scene stolen from Emma, strangely. Generic period costuming. The script actually plugging the title in dialog. It's a great work of literature as adapted from its Cliff's Notes, but they didn't read anything beyond the synopsis. It's the surface plot without much analysis, which is odd because renowned writers like Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin have their names on it. Not to say it isn't watchable. Some of Austen's text survives, after all, but the direction is flat and few ironic lines really land, so in the end, we have a safe and cozy period romcom. That's okay, but it's not great Jane Austen.