The most dangerous thing about Pandora is that you might grow to love her too much

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

2022

Directed by James Cameron

Written by Josh Friedman, Shane Salerno, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and James Cameron

Spoilers: high

Seems like I should be getting somewhere, somehow I'm neither here nor there

BULLET TRAIN

2022

Directed by David Leitch

Written by Zak Olkewicz (based on the novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka)

Spoilers: moderate

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety

CLEOPATRA

1963

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Written by Ranald MacDougall, Sidney Buchman, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (based on The Life and Times of Cleopatra by Carlo Maria Franzero, plus Plutarch and that whole gang)

Spoilers: N/A

The Encyclopedia Brown: But we're supposed to work for the tsar

THE COSSACKS

1928

Directed by George Hill and Clarence Brown

Written by Frances Marion (based on the novel by Lev Tolstoy)

Spoilers: moderate

Kick me in the jimmy

THE STORY OF QIU JU

1992

Directed by Zhang Yimou

Written by Liu Heng (based on the novella "The Wan Family's Lawsuit" by Chen Yuabin)

Spoilers: mild

Steven Spielberg, part XXXIX: Hey, I know a song, it's called "While You Were Singing, I Got Stabbed In the Head By a Puerto Rican"

WEST SIDE STORY

2021

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Tony Kushner (based on the play by Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim)

Spoilers: severe

Transparent allegory

GLASS ONION

2022

Written and directed by Rian Johnson

Spoilers: moderate

Unhappy landing

DEVOTION

2022

Directed by J.D. Dillard

Written by Jake Crane and Jonathan Stewart (based on the book Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice)

Spoilers: notice that the book it's based on has "sacrifice" in the title

Pulped fiction

STRANGE WORLD

2022

Directed by Don Hall (co-directed by Qui Nguyen)

Written by Qui Nguyen

Spoilers: moderate

What a disaster: They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash.

AIRPLANE!

1980

Written and directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker

Spoilers: moderate (but c'mon, you've seen it)

Namor, Namór, let's call the whole thing off

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

2022

Directed by Ryan Coogler

Written by Joe Robert Cole and Ryan Coogler

Spoilers: high

The Encyclopedia Brown: There's gold in them thar hills

THE TRAIL OF '98

1928

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Benjamin Glazer, Joseph Farnham, and Waldemar Young (based on the novel by Robert W. Service)

Spoilers: well, it certainly doesn't last, does it? (moderate)

The Encyclopedia Brown: An Early Clarence Brown Compendium

In which we file away The Blue Bird (1918), The Last of the Mohicans (1920), "The Light of Faith" (1922), The Signal Tower (1924), Smouldering Fires (1925), The Goose Woman (1925), The Eagle (1925), and Kiki (1926), plus—talkie bonus!—Navy Blues (1929)

One should not have to "discover" Clarence Brown, but that's the way it is in the year 2022, and the way it has been since, probably, the mid-1950s, when he retired on his own terms to go live on a ranch for the next three decades.  Maybe the word "discover" does too much: he's only as obscure as any Old Hollywood studio man, but such a person can get pretty obscure, after all, because it sometimes feels like so much of the fullness and flavor of Old Hollywood's legacy was lost to the grimly-streamlined Boomer cinematic canon, which became the dull, conformist framework for communicating and teaching film history for the next sixty years.  In any case, discovery is what it felt like to me, when I noticed over the course of about a year that the guy who did The Rains Came was the guy who did The Yearling was the guy who did Flesh and the Devil and I said, "okay, show me" when National Velvet made its rounds on HBOMax and I saw that this, too, was Brown, leading to the statistically-startling and hugely-tantalizing realization that I had seen four Brown movies at more-or-less random but had also seen four masterpieces.

And then, as I do, I got really enthusiastic and burned through Brown's 1941-1947 stretch for no reason but I felt like it, since "what I feel like" is the long and short of my critical ethos here, and as I've gotten a better grasp of the director, it turns out that for whatever reason that stretch in the third decade of his career saw Brown hit not only his stride (just great movie after great movie in the middle of that decade) but also many of his highest peaks, which means that were I to, say, decide upon a more systematic overview of his career, it would be almost guaranteed to be a bit of a let-down.  After all, nobody, not nobody—at least not nobody who had to do what Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer told him to once or twice or three times a year, whether he wanted to do it or not—was likely to have managed to keep that level of superlative quality up.  That's something that his tossed-off second film of 1941, They Met In Bombay, indicates powerfully, despite coming in between Come Live With Me and The Human Comedy.  That's just the business—even beyond the studio system, you should expect even the greatest filmmakers to have fallow periods and the occasional dud—but you know, Brown's late 1920s and 1930s aren't wastelands either.  They absolutely have some peaks of their own, and not just a few, either.

I'm a genie in a bottle, you've got to rub me the right way

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING

2022

Directed by George Miller

Written by Augusta Gore and George Miller (based on the short story "The Djinn In the Nightingale's Eye" by A.S. Bryant")

Spoilers: moderate

Bald thing, I think I love you

EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY

1988

Directed by Julien Temple

Written by Julie Brown, Terrence E. McNalley, and Charlie Coffey

Spoilers: moderate

Feminine mystique

THE MYSTERIOUS LADY

1928

Directed by Fred Niblo

Written by Bess Meredyth, Frances Marion, Marian Ainslee, and Ruth Cummings (based on the novel War in the Dark by Ludwig Wolff)

Spoilers: moderate

Busby Berkeley: In hot?

IN CALIENTE

1935

Directed by Lloyd Bacon

Written by Ralph Block, Warren Duff, Jerry Wald, and Julius Epstein

Spoilers: moderate

Reanimation

WENDELL & WILD

2022

Directed by Henry Selick

Written by Jordan Peele and Henry Selick

Spoilers: moderate

The man who killed the British Empire but not the Bigfoot

MISSING LINK

2019

Written and directed by Chris Butler

Spoilers: moderate

Gilbert and Garbo in

LOVE

1927

Directed by Edmund Goulding

Written by Lorna Moon, Frances Marion, Marian Ainslee, and Ruth Cummings (based on the novel Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy)

Spoilers: saying there could be something to meaningfully spoil about this adaptation of Anna Karenina is a spoiler in itself, ain't it?

Census Bloodbath: Jock shock

CUTTING CLASS

And once again we welcome you, to our October Switcheroo

Where Brennan Klein deigns to review nice old sci-fi, like I would do.

But pretending to alliance, Brennan sends me 80s violence!

Cardboard Bloodbath, Census Science, demands psychic realignment.

Oh we have fun—requisite links.  Here's hoping that not too much stinks.

Poetry blows, J. Slasherfan thinks. Give me TITS and DEATH, that's my kink!

1989

Directed by Rospo Pallenberg

Written by Steve Slavkin

Census Bloodbath: A true crime

RETURN TO HORROR HIGH

And once again we welcome you, to our October Switcheroo

Where Brennan Klein deigns to review nice old sci-fi, like I would do.

But pretending to alliance, Brennan sends me 80s violence!

Cardboard Bloodbath, Census Science, demands psychic realignment.

Oh we have fun—requisite links.  Here's hoping that not too much stinks.

Poetry blows, J. Slasherfan thinks. Give me TITS and DEATH, that's my kink!

1987

Directed by Bill Froelich

Written by Bill Froelich, Dana Escalante, Mark Lisson, and Greg H. Sims

Census Bloodbath: Gorked up

HELL NIGHT

And once again we welcome you, to our October Switcheroo

Where Brennan Klein deigns to review nice old sci-fi, like I would do.

But pretending to alliance, Brennan sends me 80s violence!

Cardboard Bloodbath, Census Science, demands psychic realignment.

Oh we have fun—requisite links.  Here's hoping that not too much stinks.

Poetry blows, J. Slasherfan thinks. Give me TITS and DEATH, that's my kink!

1981

Directed by Tom DeSimone

Written by Randy Feldman

What a disaster: The pirates of Byzance

RAISE THE TITANIC

1980

Directed by Jerry Jameson

Written by Adam Kennedy, Eric Hughes, and many others (based on the novel by Clive Cussler)

Spoilers: moderate (high if you don't read film's titles before you watch them)

What a disaster: Lava come down soft and hot, you betta lava me now, or lava me not

WHEN TIME RAN OUT...

1980

Directed by James Goldstone

Written by Carl Foreman and Stirling Silliphant

Spoilers: moderate

You know, you're much uglier when you smile

SMILE

2022

Written and directed by Parker Finn

Spoilers: moderate

What a disaster: The Zeus Katachthonios adventure

CAVE-IN!

1983

Directed by Georg Fenady

Written by Norman Katkov

Spoilers: moderate

Hard to be a god

MAD GOD

2022

Written and directed by Phil Tippett

Spoilers: moderate/inapplicable

What a disaster: "Geological faults"? I knew sooner or later you'd get around to that tired old chestnut

THE NIGHT THE BRIDGE FELL DOWN

1983

Directed by Georg Fenady

Written by Arthur Weiss, Ray Goldstone, Michael Robert David, and Alvin Boretz

Spoilers: moderate

What, me worry?

DON'T WORRY DARLING

2022

Directed by Olivia Wilde

Written by Katie Silberman, Shane Van Dyke, and Carey Van Dyke

Spoilers: moderate with some choice redactions, though the main thrust of it is, I presume, supposed to be pretty obvious

Sleeping, yes, but only a rather ordinary 5'10"

TORA! TORA! TORA!

Directed by Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, and Kinji Fukasaku

Written by Larry Forrester, Hideo Oguni, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Akira Kurosawa

Spoilers: eventually, we won

What a hiatus

Quick note made under the perhaps misguided apprehension anyone cares: I've let this lay fallow for I think the longest hiatus in the blog's history, not through any particular design—sure, the pervasive "what is the point?" demotivation that hits me whenever I compare Kinemalogue's readership to, for example, the viewership of even the dumbest YouTube morons, is probably some kind of causal factor, but not the causal factor—but because 1)I've been charged with a downright unusual amount of overtime work for my firm and 2)some manner of illness that I don't think was covid, but, shit, might've been a bacterial sinus infection that opened a door for covid.  Either way, I feel pretty poorly.  (These don't contradict each other that much: the lack of satisfaction or interest are perennial bummers, but the job has its upsides, too.)

Anyway, that's all.  Regular programming should resume at some point soon whenever I work up the energy to puts words to paper for an already half-complete review of Tora! Tora! Tora! (more Fleischer, yeah!) and a review of Don't Worry Darling (sure do wish I liked that movie more, given how much life YouTube morons sucked from it in pursuit of their parasitic work).  Go with God, you amorphous, largely-invisible people that I pretend exist!

Have a nice trip, see you next

FALL

2022

Directed by Scott Mann

Written by Jonathan Frank and Scott Mann

Spoilers: moderate

Cat

BEAST

2022

Directed by Baltasar Kormákur

Written by Ryan Engle and Jamie Primak Sullivan

Spoilers: mild

A planetary romance

FIRE OF LOVE

2022

Directed by Sara Dosa

Written by Shane Boris, Erin Casper, Jocelyn Casper, and Sara Dosa

Spoilers: big N/A

To ninety-five years after publication and beyond

LIGHTYEAR

2022

Directed by Angus MacLane

Written by Jason Headley, Matthew Aldrich, and Angus MacLane

Spoilers: moderate

Aliens and Indians

PREY

2022

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg

Written by Patrick Aison and Dan Trachtenberg

Spoilers: moderate

Cowboys and aliens

NOPE

2022

Written and directed by Jordan Peele

Spoilers: high

A boy and his deer

THE YEARLING

1946

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Paul Osborn and John Lee Mahin (based on the novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings)

Spoilers: moderate

Cardboard Science: And out of the smoke locusts came forth unto the earth, and power was given to them

BEGINNING OF THE END

1957

Directed by Bert I. Gordon

Written by Fred Freiberger, Lester Gorn, and Bert I. Gordon

Spoilers: moderate

Making love out of nothing at all

THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER

2022

Directed by Taika Waititi

Written by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Taika Waititi

Spoilers: moderate

Cardboard Science: B-I-G

THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN

1957

Directed by Bert I. Gordon

Written by Mark Hanna, George Worthing Yates, and Bert I. Gordon

Spoilers: moderate

Cardboard Science: Size queen

ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN

1958

Directed by Nathan Hertz Juran

Written by Mark Hanna

Spoilers: moderate

Cardboard Science: Dangerous minds

THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS

1957

Directed by Nathan Hertz Juran

Written by Ray Buffum and Jacques Marquette

Spoilers: high

Hunk of burning love

ELVIS

2022

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Written by Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner, and Baz Luhrmann

Spoilers: N/A

You just use that... shin of yours to call me, and I'll come a-running

THE BLACK PHONE

2022

Directed by Scott Derrickson

Written by C. Scott Cargill and Scott Derrickson

Spoilers: moderate

Faces of death

SINISTER

2012

Directed by Scott Derrickson

Written by C. Robert Cargill and Scott Derrickson

Spoilers: high

You're selfish, you're crazy, and you're scared

DAYS OF THUNDER

1990

Directed by Tony Scott

Written by Tom Cruise and Robert Towne

Spoilers: high

Neigh

INTERNATIONAL VELVET

1978

Written and directed by Bryan Forbes

Spoilers: moderate

Days of thunder

NATIONAL VELVET

1944

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Theodore Reeves, Helen Deutsch, and Howard Dimsdale (based on the novel by Enid Bagnold)

Spoilers: high

I killed a man who I hated today

REVENGE

1990

Directed by Tony Scott

Written by Jim Harrison and Jeffrey Alan Fiskin (based on the novella by Jim Harrison)

Spoilers: moderate