Wednesday, November 30, 2022

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

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Pulped fiction


STRANGE WORLD

2022
Directed by Don Hall (co-directed by Qui Nguyen)
Written by Qui Nguyen

Spoilers: moderate

Saturday, November 19, 2022

Friday, November 18, 2022

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)

Thursday, November 17, 2022

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 nobodyat 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 notwas 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 businesseven beyond the studio system, you should expect even the greatest filmmakers to have fallow periods and the occasional dudbut 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.

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

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

Sunday, November 13, 2022

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

Saturday, November 12, 2022

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

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Busby Berkeley: In hot?


IN CALIENTE

1935
Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Written by Ralph Block, Warren Duff, Jerry Wald, and Julius Epstein

Spoilers: moderate

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Reanimation


WENDELL & WILD

2022
Directed by Henry Selick
Written by Jordan Peele and Henry Selick

Spoilers: moderate

Sunday, November 6, 2022

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?