1947 - US
Director
Michael Curtiz
Starring
Irene Dunne, William Powell, Elizabeth Taylor
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Public domain is an awesome thing but it’s no excuse for treating movies like shit. I mean, there are a zillion releases of this film and all in poor quality, yes to the extent that appreciating it is made more difficult. Anyway, it’s the kind of good-natured thing that grates on my nerves but William Powell — always wonderful — is quite mind-blowing here; Irene Dunne does her ever-delightful dizzy dame thang.
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Two things I’m principally mad about:
1) War is fucking hell and I don’t need a sermonizing Haggis to remind me of this. And I can’t stand to think of how this is all fucking with people’s lives, what it does to people when they come back. All right. But this film borders on excusing things like Abu Ghraib and what happens in this film: it’s not the soldiers’ fault at all, it’s just war man. The horror, the horror.
2) Something about making such a conventional, artless film out of this, with chase scenes and the usual whodunit procedural narrative and blah blah blah really turns my stomach… And basically insults the intelligence of all viewers, regardless of their position on the war. It’s just a DUMB, cheap film.
Ugh, the guy is such a self-righteous fuck.
[...Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod]
1999 - Germany
Director
Rolf Schubel
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In many ways, this is trite and predictable and full of little conveniences, drawing from every Holocaust film, genre melodrama, and swingin’ threesome movie that’s come before it. For all that, it is strangely and strongly affecting. I gather this is also a historically irresponsible appropriation of a real Hungarian suicide song myth, and yet I want a soundtrack of every variation on the theme in the film’s score. It also suffers from the director’s preoccupation with Erika Marozsán’s bouncy breasts, and the actress’ blatant attempt at channeling Hanna Schygulla. All in all a rewarding mixed bag.
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[Tüzoltó utca 25.]
1973 - Hungary
Director
Istvan Szabo
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As close to the high modernist literature of Woolf and Proust as I have ever seen realized on film, colored by the survival of horrors Proust never dreamed of and Woolf killed herself rather than endure. Rich in imagery and wandering, disconnected thoughts almost to a fault — certainly not all is comprehensible on one viewing — but this flows along in a kind of dissonant harmony very much in manner of The Waves, my favorite novel… So yes, it is pleasing to my eye, and very nearly a masterpiece if you ask me… compare, of course, with that ugly 5.6 on IMDb…
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2007 - US
Director
Neil Jordan
Starring
Jodie Foster, Terrance Howard, Naveen Andrews
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Jodie Foster is fucking fantastic as the alternately menaced and menacing survivor of a random attack in Central Park. The film, unfortunately, is very weak. I hate it when that happens.
For a film that wants to say something about moral relativism, there isn’t a lot of room for shades of grey. Before the attack, Erica’s life is picture perfect: perfect job, perfect fiance (for the first time, I got to hear Lost’s Naveen Andrews with his real [British] accent, and as a high point in the film let me just say this only makes him hunkier). No one talks like the people in this stage of Erica’s life do. Everyone talks the way people do when they first meet, awkwardly and excessively politely.
After the attack, New York is nothing but a terror zone, and not only in Erica’s understandably damaged perception. Everywhere she goes, she happens to run into a crime in progress. Equally conveniently, Terrence Howard’s cop is the first to arrive on every scene after she exacts revenge. At this stage, everyone talks in ’40s noir quips. Not in a canny throwback kind of way, but a really forced and flat kind of way.
There are seeds of an interesting story in this: gender politics (OMG, could the vigilante be a woman?!) and, again, the issue of moral relativity, justice, law &c. That ground has been trodden before, but interesting things can still be said. Yet at every turn, this film opts for the simple plot twist (my audience called them out as if stunned at their own brilliance: “she’s going to kill him herself!”) and catchphrase in place of thought. By the time Erica’s dog — separated from her during the attack — comes back on the scene, my credulity was strained far beyond its limits. Close the film with a Sarah McLachlan ballad and I’m just done.
So I say the film is lucky as hell Jodie Foster is in almost every frame (and in the few she is not, the always good Howard is). She very nearly makes the whole thing work with a deeply felt but never overwrought performance. I hope the film’s quality doesn’t negatively impact her chances, awards-wise. Hers is going to go down as one of the finest of the year.
The other story here is the fucking audience I watched this thing with, over half of whom whooped and cheered every time she fired her gun. I realize the moviegoing public has been set up to root for a protagonist, but even if this film had succeeded in saying something interesting about moral relativism it would have been lost on its viewers. Michael Haneke is bringing Funny Games to America and they won’t get that, either. They’ll be thrilled at having seen another horror film. “It sucks that they didn’t show more violence,” they’ll walk out saying, “but it was pretty scary, yeahhh!” They won’t get it. When those people cheered today my stomach lurched. But we’re warmongers, we’re spectators of violent sports, we’re armed and no one can take our guns away from us! and I knew this already… Oh, and just to show we have our priorities straight, IMDb posters are consulting each other before screening this to find out what “level of sexuality” it may contain.
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1932 - US
Director
George Archainbaud
Starring
Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy
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Awesomely bad! Myrna Loy — from Montana though she was — in one of her early exotic roles as “some kind of half-breed, Hindu, Japanese, I don’t know.” Snubbed by an exclusive group of prep school girls at the age of 12 who wouldn’t let her into their society because she wasn’t white, she begins exacting revenge in adulthood. She sends out horoscopes predicting her classmates’ deaths, resulting in a lot of juvenile discussions about determinism and free will. And — because she’s a “half-breed” and all — she can hypnotize them into killing themselves just by looking at them cross-eyed. Irene Dunne’s our doe-eyed heroine trying to cling to reason, but I’m giving all the props to Loy in this one. Weirdest thing I’ve seen from old Hollywood yet.
Also,
…I have sort of a strange preoccupation with Madame X. 
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2004 - US
Director
Robert Altman
Starring
Michael Murphy, Cynthia Nixon, Pamela Reed
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Surprisingly, this is very nearly as good as Tanner ‘88. Just more of the same, of course: dry politico humor, inserting Jack Tanner into the course of events à la Forrest Gump, gentle metanarratives &c. It’s strange watching this installment, though. In 2004, I knew very little about Robert Altman. But I knew that campaign too well; I’d decided to spend election day completely trashed, whether blissfully or mournfully; I broke my heart over that campaign and decided never to care so much again (a promise I think I’ve already broken in advance of 2008). So it’s strange to watch those events replayed now, slightly askew (oh god, have we really been saying “stay the course” for four years now?). I knew of the events and persons in Tanner ‘88, but I knew those of Tanner on Tanner. In any case, I can say this approach to filmmaking consistently suits Altman, and I wish there were a Tanner for every presidential cycle. More sad than ever that there will not be.
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1948 - US
Director
George Stevens
Starring
Irene Dunne
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This is a perfectly good film of a sort that doesn’t necessarily interest me, but for a classic family drama with just the right balance of humor and pathos, it probably doesn’t get much better. What does interest me, of course, is Irene Dunne, giving if not her best performance then certainly her second best after her should-be iconic role in The Awful Truth: not so much for the more obvious accent work in the role of a first-generation Norwegian immigrant in an era when it was attempted seldomly and always poorly (ahhh, the vaguely British pan-European invented accent of Old Hollywood…), but for every expressive, deeply felt, utterly human glance and gesture. The Golden Age was full of personalities, types, and symbols, but there were far fewer real and versatile actors… Irene Dunne was such an actor, and could have worked her pure magic in any film era.
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[Nue propriété]
2007 - Belgium
Director
Joachim Lafosse
Starring
Isabelle Huppert, Jérémie Renier, Yannick Renier
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Minimalist, assured film about a family that could be any family, rife with believable tensions explored mostly in silence and suggestion until characters are pushed too far. A simple and rich film that leaves judgment to the viewer in such a way as to invite them in rather than keep them at arm’s length.
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2007 - Canada
Director Sarah Polley
Starring
Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis
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It started about 20 minutes into the film and only for a few brief moments did I stop sobbing until well after the credits rolled. Not all of this can be explained as Polley’s masterful adaptation or direction: a film about Alzheimer’s is likely to be disturbing and heartbreaking even under the worst of circumstances. It is to Polley’s credit that she kept things simple: allowed the condition and her subject’s deterioration to speak for themselves and her excellent cast to explore the emotional terrain freely. Only the aspect of sacrifice as it manifests itself in the last half hour struck me as fairly awkward and poorly reasoned in an otherwise authentic, natural inexorable march into the certain future. The problem seems to arise when writer and adapter feel a need to impose a conventional plot upon a condition which has no reason, no logical progression, no rules or order. It would be better served with less structure propping it up, as the film was more successful in achieving in the first hour or so. Simply: this is how it is; this is how we cope.
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 Lauren, 25, out-of-work librarian. At the moment, TLC is but a review blog and catalogue of my film-related perversions. I always plan to do more with it — and to one day step outside 30s Hollywood again. Who knows?
Films: All reviewed | Favorites
Actors: Profiles | Favorites
Directors: Profiles | Favorites
Screencap galleries
All films by year
2008 Viewing log
» Appaloosa 2008, Ed Harris
» Belle toujours 2007, Manoel de Oliveira
» Duel in the Sun 1946, King Vidor
» Dragonwyck 1946, Joseph L Mankiewicz
» The Spiral Staircase 1945, Robert Siodmak
» The Man Who Knew Too Much 1934, Alfred Hitchcock
» Tell No One 2008, Guillaume Canet
» Heaven Knows, Mr Allison 1957, John Huston
» Vicky Cristina Barcelona 2008, Woody Allen
» The Great Lie 1941, Edmund Goulding
Dodsworth (3)
- diane: He can be “glimpsed” in “There Goes the Bride” as one of the young men in the...
The Rich Are Always with Us (1)
- diane: I liked “The Rich are Always With Us”. The two things I always remember about it are the...
History is Made at Night (1)
- Evangeline: I cannot praise this movie enough. It’s just…great. A perfect movie experience.
The Kid Brother (2)
- Mango: @bebe I was always under the impression that it was the people who watched silents that thought they were too...
- bebe daniels: Yes, I agree. This is the movie that I show to people who think they’re too good or sophisticated...
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