Marc Webb directs Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel and Chloë-Grace Moretz in this romantic comedy about a boy who falls for a girl who doesn’t love him and breaks his heart – told out of sequence and with flights of fantasy.
Two very likeable stars play two of the most obnoxious and selfish characters ever to grace a rom-com. Spit, needs to clean the bad taste from my mouth. A lot of directorial effort to make a stinky mess. Why did I give this a second chance? Movie has rubbed me up the wrong way TWICE now.
4
Perfect Double Bill: Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008)
Stan Dragoti directs Michael Keaton, Teri Garr and Martin Mull in this battle of the sexes comedy where when Dad loses his job he stays home and keeps house, while Mom becomes the breadwinner.
Sleazy elevator sax score from Lee Holdridge. We had this taped off the telly as kids so watched it a lot. It probably didn’t deserve as much attention as we gave it. Feels a bit too much like an extended pilot for a sitcom. Keaton (full power, even through joke-free scenes) and Garr have nice chemistry and you can feel John Hughes fingerprints all over the script. The gender stuff now plays like a museum relic but the recession politics of the workplace scenes still holds true.
Adam McKay directs Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate and Paul Rudd in this spoof comedy where a Seventies TV newsman has his perfect world rocked when he has to share the spotlight with a superior female co-lead.
“Good evening, San Diego. I’m Veronica Corningstone. Tits McGee is on vacation.” The film that launched a hundred quotes, a zillion gifs and made Ferrell a star. It is still very funny but this Saturday night rewatch didn’t hit the same giddy heights of laughter as it once did. I was expecting gales of laughs. Now knowing what he next went on to do you have the creeping suspicion that even here that McKay is trying to say something important about masculinity and sexism. Ugh! The best jokes still work gangbusters – Baxter, “I love lamp”, Sex Panther, “I’m Ron Burgundy?”, Jazz Flute, Afternoon Delight, milk. It is better looking than most comedies of the era. Applegate and, particularly, Rudd are superb.
Arthur Lubin directs Claude Rains, Susanna Foster and Nelson Eddy in this period romantic thriller loosely based on Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel.
Surprised this doesn’t have a stronger reputation. OK… so the scenes without the impeccable Claude Rains are a bit doily and duff but the gothic thriller stuff, especially the cavernous underground finale, are very compelling. Our DVD skipped a few bits but this interpretation is a frothy blast with little arias of horror. Clearly the direct synoptic influence on the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
Maurice Pialat directs Sandrine Bonnaire, himself and Evelyne Ker in this French teen movie where a daddy’s girl discovers sex.
Very highly regarded and I’m thinking over it retrospectively and acknowledging all of the low key naturalism and Bonnaire’s sensitive arc. Then I remember why I am scoring this so low… the mother and brother’s over the top performances. Maybe we are seeing them from the 15 year old’s warped point of view. Grotesque, screeching bullies. But little else in the film suggest that that is the mode of the day. For me, their distasteful scenes kill a classic.
Tom Vaughan directs Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher and Rob Corddry in this romantic comedy where a drunken holiday turns into a quickie marriage turns into a hungover jackpot win turns into a forced relationship…
Romantic comedy as reformed meat. Depressing, textureless.
John Ford directs John Wayne, James Stewart and Lee Marvin in this western drama where a big time politician returns to the town where he first made his name as a law loving tenderfoot and remembers the violent men who would change the course of his life.
In terms of storytelling and cinematic craftsmanship absolutely flawless. The schoolhouse scene where the illiterate and under civilised discuss the Constitution with Stewart’s paternal authoritarian giving no slither of room for open interpretation is a powerhouse. That must have been electric to watch during the zenith of the Civil Rights movement. There are three fantastic movie star performances within – Wayne (never more masculine), Stewart (the future and all that is decent and depressing about that future) and Marvin (just a wild bastard man of a villain.) Woody Strode is cool as fuck too. The last days of the Wild West remembered and, while this is told in the mode of the traditional classic western, one can see the revisionist roots of The Wild Bunch, Heaven’s Gate and Deadwood flourishing within its fertile perfection.
Sidney Lumet directs Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve and Dyan Cannon in this filmed play about a murder mystery playwright who needs a smash even if it means killing someone.
Very meta. Have seen this live and it works better. Always nice to enjoy Reeve in a non-Supes role. The silly psychic character feels like a deep tongue-in-cheek choice that tears a hole in the face. Fun but not earth shattering. Side note – I like Lumet’s habit of working every year but alternating between big meaty dramas or crime pics and then relaxing into just taking a Broadway hit and figuring out the camera set-ups and which movie stars would work in an intimate environment for his fallow year. Kept him busy, stopped him becoming stale.
Michel Gondry directs Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet and Kirsten Dunst in this surreal anti-romantic comedy where a heartbroken man gets all the memories of his ex wiped.
Charlie Kaufman is a fascinating writer and film maker. His work is deadpan but emotionally rich. Surreal but grounded in the mundane. Literate to the point of being obtuse (there are at least two of his movies whose titles I wouldn’t be confident saying out loud in public) yet the feelings his complex meta narratives interrogate are universally recognisable. He picks away at the scabs of modern living, modern relationships and our vicious internal lives and turns these assassinations of the now into vivid, original flights of fantasy. Watch our protagonist’s Joel Barish’s memories crumble, wipe, self destruct and eliminate before our very eyes. A bleaker, sustained visual metaphor for forgetting has never before been realised on screen. Quirky French video director Gondry might have come up with the methodology but Kafman’s script of brain immolation is the blueprint for this stunning live delete. The central invention of the story could only occur in a pre-social media age. So this 2004 baby gets in just under the wire as one of the last analogue era artefacts of relationships before Facebook. Now our memories aren’t hidden in shoeboxes or on dusty album shelves, contact with people is a lot more difficult to switch off. Few of us truly leave our hive never to be heard from again. Our footprint left in others lives is impossible refill and our contact with others who share contact is harder to sever. It is quite quaint seeing Kaufman and Gondry’s world of cassette tapes, mass mail outs and hand written notebooks. There’s a bleak cynicism to the narrative thrust. After starting to have his memories of Clementine erased Joel begins to realise he loves her. He needs the context of the last few years, the adjacent memories of books read and knowledge earned… he tries to stop the delete and save the relationship. Hold onto one last recognition of her so he can reignite the partnership once the process is complete. But he only starts his quest once the hurt, paranoia and doubt has been removed. Who is to say Clementine and Joel will fare any better on the second attempt? Or even if this new attempt will be only their second attempt? How many previous tries to make a go of it have already been wiped? The final act is genuinely heartbreaking… revelations, reconciliations and important moments in one’s emotional development reduced to fading whispers. “I need your loving like the sunshine. Everybody’s gotta learn sometimes.” A paranoid nightmare and the finest break-up movie ever made.
Sarah Polley directs Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley in this drama where the women of an insular religious community decide what to do when it is revealed some of the men have been raping them in their sleep over the decades and they are now instructed to forgive them.
A #metoo The Crucible… only nowhere near as compelling. Allegory. Talky allegory. Characters who represent reactions rather than fully blooded humans. Viewpoints rather than actual women. Moments of magical realism that clang. Attempts to humanise with bursts of levity and laughter that make no sense. Women Talking can feel almost parodic at times… I guess that’s the ultimate peril of sincerity. The poetry and meaning of the monologues and representations might be worth unstitching if it wasn’t so fucking boring. It does at least look beautiful. Like a Terrence Malick film with the nitrate scraped off. You can’t deny the quality of the cast… although Frances McDormand fans might feel poorly catered for. The slightly touched man sat behind us at the multiplex read the BBFC content warning out loud just before it all began. “Sexual violence references, sexual threat, domestic abuse.” “Ooh excellent!” he proclaimed unguardedly. That was the closest we got to entertainment here.
