* Shazam! Fury of the Gods (David F. Sandberg, 2023): 3/5

Teenagers with superpowers, monsters, dragons, unicorns, a labyrinth, little blood or exposition, a couple of potty words. Seemed like a winning formula to me, but the film underperformed. I’m actually liking these Marvel-ish movies more than in the past, just as audiences are liking them less. Shrug.

 

* The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Michael Jelenic, Aaron Horvath, 2023): 3/5

I have almost no memory of this. 

 

The Outwaters (Robbie Banfitch, 2023): 4/5

I have heard this described as part of a wave of art-horror movies, along with Skinamarink, that foreground the art over the horror. Still, this one, about a camping trip to the desert gone horrendously wrong, scared the living shit out of me. Apparently, your milage may vary.

 

Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2023): 2.5/5

A folk horror movie with precious little horror, just gradual mental disintegration, as memory and trauma are re-experienced after months of solitude on an island. We’ve been here before. 

 

Sick (John Hyams, 2023): 1.5/5

Classic post-Scream slasher. Not my favorite genre, with all its “women in peril and being stabbed” vibes. The film’s choice of antagonists, once revealed, disastrously ruins whatever fun we’ve been having so far. 

 

Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2022): 1.5/5

I watched this on the plane ride back from Hawaii, but even the oxygen-rich environment couldn’t make it anything more than an after-school special. Also, it’s really weird that it’s filled (very) non-Jewish actors Jewing it up. Anthony Hopkins? Anne Hathaway???

 

A Dog’s Life, 34 mins (Charlie Chaplin, 1918): 3/5

The best bit is when The Tramp has knocked out one of two thieves sitting across from one another at a table, but he’s hiding behind a curtain behind the unconscious one and has stuck his arms through the unconscious guy’s underarms. The business pretending to be the guy’s hands and arms amply demonstrates Chaplain’s genius. 

 

Possibly in Michigan, 12 mins (Cecelia Condit, 1983): 3.5/5

A funny, weird and horrific feminist musical on primitive video. 

 

Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005): 3.5/5

An entertaining, beautiful and extremely faithful adaptation of this book, which I just read. 

 

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927): 3/5

Would make a hell of a double bill with Germany Year Zero, just 21 years later.

 

My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Aleksey German, 1984): 2.5/5

A chaos of characters, situations and emotions—open ended and ambiguous episodes, enacted upon icy landscapes. Possibly we are following a collective of ex-soldiers who are now police? 

 

Khrustalyov, My Car (Aleksey German, 1998): 2/5

More interminable tracking shots through absurdity. We’re gliding through a village. One guy is singing, one twirling. One saying he’s a bed bug. One crashing a car into a tree. One kicking another. One climbing up and over a fence. It’s nonsense, and it goes on and on. At least this one has a kind of main character sometimes, a doctor who eventually oversees the death of Stalin himself, so I suppose we’ve discovered the root of all the ridiculous rot. 

 

Hard to be a God (Aleksey German, 2013): 2/5

Mud, shit, snot, blood, spit, toe jam, wine, urine, donkey dicks, vomit, dwarves, intestines. A tiresome series of steady cam shots creeping through chaotic and repulsive tableau. The idea—that our protagonist is an enlightened scientist from another planet who nevertheless has pledged to not interfere in the actions of these disgusting and cruel citizens—is a potent analogy to God but goes complexly unexplored in favor of disgusting sensation.

 

 

A Mostly Early Ernst Lubitsch Film Fest

The earliest film here, from 1925, is Lubitsch’s 47th film.

 

Lady Windermere’s Fan (Ernst Lubitsch, 1925): 3/5

A set of Three’s Company-like misunderstandings among the very rich, leading to a tragic and ironic sacrificial act by one of the main characters. Not a witty and enjoyable romantic comedy. 

 

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927): 3/5

A witty and enjoyable romantic comedy. Loved the scene of their first kiss, on a large set with a sky full of stars and a hillside with white flowers blowing in the wind of feeling between them. 

 

Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931): 4/5

Admittedly everyone is playing it the “popinjay” dial turned up to 11. Still, it’s clever, and full of fun uses of music to underly the actions (like, say, violin pizzicato at each footstep up a stairs) almost like a cartoon. I realize this is “pre-code,” but I’m still shocked and delighted by all the fucking in this movie. In the first 5 minutes a woman enters a man’s apartment. We watch the hall lamp slowly burn down and out. Then the woman leaves. Cut to the man in bed in his pjs clearly enjoying post-coital bliss. Claudette Colbert, doing her best Betty Boop, is likely 27 at the time of filming, three years before It Happened One Night (1934). She was born in 1903 and died at 93 years of age in Barbados.

 

One Hour with You (Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, 1932): 2.5/5

An operetta of sorts, with songs but also lyrical passages where people speak dialogue in rhyme. It’s a failed/dead-ended genre, as filmmakers tried to figure out what the audience might want/accept from a sound movie. Surprisingly cynical: our protagonist doesn’t really want to have an affair, but does anyway, with a shrug: “What would you do?”

 

Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932): 2.5/5

Not a Lubitsch, but it borrows his operetta genre, his two stars (Maurice Chevalier and sex-pot Jeanette MacDonald) and tone from One Hour with You. 

 

Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946): 3.5/5

A witty script and a funny performance by Jennifer Jones make this a delight. Gently skewers pretension both upstairs, downstairs and among the intelligentsia.

 

 

Erich von Stroheim Film Fest

A big differences between Stroheim and Lubitsch is that Lubitsch characters fuck but Stroheim characters FUUUUCK. What’s remarkable about Stroheim’s work is its scale and ambition. What’s difficult about it is its turgidness, its slowness, each moment a potential reverie. What’s odd about it is its self-criticism. Stroheim himself consistently portrays a shallow, sadistic, weak, unlikeable, officious liar with false and grandiose pretentious of nobility, all of which VS himself demonstrated in spades. "And this is why Stroheim is the most important, more important than Griffith or Ford...that everything you show is both magnificent and the opposite must be felt.” - Jean-Marie Straub

 

Blind Husbands (Erich von Stroheim, 1919): 4.5/5

Stroheim takes such obvious and simple pleasure in presenting himself as a real asshole. As always, he here plays a seduction machine with a crisp uniform—mutually eye-fucking all on-screen females, especially vulnerable maids and waitresses. He’s an Atheist to boot: “To me,” he retorts to all the talk of the Spirit of the Mountain, “mountains are lifeless rocks. My pleasure has always been to master them.” Witness as two men free-climb a giant phallus (thrillingly) while the woman they both “love” sits in her dark room at the inn. 

 

Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922): 3.5/5

Stroheim portrays a con man in Monaco who smokes cigarettes fully 10 inches long and pretends to be a nobleman in order to seduce a young American. At one point, he manipulates his maid (whom he has previously seduced and promised to marry) until she begs him to accept the little money she has carefully saved up. 

 

The Merry Widow (Erich von Stroheim, 1925): 5/5

The director credit reads “Personally Directed by,” and he’s not kidding. Lingering shots of shiny boots, an under-the-table footsie-cam, caviar served from a giant bloc of ice, blindfolded musicians in the prince’s apartment, and lots of other elaborate production design as well as sadistic and fetishistic behavior. In both this movie and Lubitsch’s The Student Prince, a prince falls in love with a commoner and is then forced to break off the engagement because of princely duty. In Lubitsch the girl meekly and tragically accepts her fate, but here instead she becomes rich then returns to the prince as a kind of sadomasochistic avenging angel. To Jerry’s point from August 17 of 2021, the size and complexity of the sets and crowds—as well as the emotions—makes Stroheim’s version a comparatively tough sell for the studios. 

 

The Wedding March (Erich von Stroheim, 1928): 4/5

The director credit reads: “In its entirety an Erich von Stroheim creation.” Compared to the contemporaneous work of some of Stroheim’s peers (I’m thinking primarily of D.W. Griffith or Lubitsch), the dramaturgy here is slow. Scenes are long and contain way more redundant shot/reverse shots than is typical. On the other hand, with this technique he often finds eddies of unusual beauty and ugliness. During the meet-cute, our protagonist (possibly) intentionally injures Fay Wray just so he can go visit her in the hospital to begin his seduction. And soon after we have a gorgeous and transcendent scene where he seduces Wray under a glowing white apple tree with blossoms falling around them like burning snow. 

 

 

Robert Siodmak Film Fest

Mostly twisty, glittering, deep-focused, Wellsian/Kubrickian noirs.

 

People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann, 1930): 3/5

Combines the style of a poetic documentary such as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City with a sparse narrative in very naturalistic style, using real people and a pseudo-Bressonian lack of affect, plus sequences that serve no purpose other than to be a brief reverie of beauty. Malick and the Renoir of A Day in the Country are fellow travelers. Siodmak’s 1st feature.

 

Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944): 4.5/5

It’s a cliche but true that what is not shown can be more powerful than what is (amply demonstrated in Succession, S3 E3 as well). For example, as the police wheel away his dead wife, the camera moves along in the place where the body would be, and our protagonist looks at “us” and says with anguish: “Look what they’re doing. Her hair along the floor.” Wow. Then later, when his verdict is being read, we are instead focused on a woman in the audience choking on an apple and we don’t even hear the words guilty or not guilty. In the last hour, Ella Wallace becomes our tenacious (and stunning) detective protagonist. She is made to innocently cuddle up with the man we know to be the killer—and is put through multiple woman-in-peril sequences, including a stark and soundless showdown in a locked, white apartment. Siodmak’s 28th feature in 14 years.

 

The Suspect (Robert Siodmak, 1944): 3/5

Hard to think of a more sympathetic double-murderer in the history of cinema. Charles Laughton is, of course, a great pleasure to watch. Elements of Crime and Punishment and Rope. 

 

The Killers, rw (Robert Siodmak, 1946): 4/5

Siodmak gets the short story down to 13 minutes, stepping around the N-word, but of course adds another hour and a half of backstory—comprised of Citizen Kane-ish skipping backwards and forwards in the Swede’s life, circling ever closer to the moment where he “did a bad thing.” Includes boxing, poker, piano-singing parties, and a heist depicted in one long and multilevel tracking shot. However, its Byzantine narrative strategy eventually exhausts and can only fully satisfy the very clever (i.e., me in my 20s). I don’t love Edmund O’Brien, “insurance detective,” but here he is in The Wild Bunch. 

The Killers, 19 mins (Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Gordon, 1956): 3.5/5

They faithfully shoot the short story as if it’s a script, which: good idea. The story is an ur-text for all the existential, dead-eyed, derby wearing killers that would soak through noir. This version films it about as well as it could be done, with all the narrative concision of the story itself. 

 

Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949): 3.5/5

Ya like a heist, a femme trés fatale, choice footage of the Angel’s Flight area of downtown L.A., and lotsa voiceover about fate? Then have I got a movie for you. Lancaster, Yvonne DeCarlo and Dan Deryea (giving off serious James-Spader-in-the-80s vibes) are all good. Soderbergh remade this as The Underneath (leading to his first career-doubting breakdown). Here's (the great) Deryea:

 

Victor Sjöström Film Fest

Each of these feels very different from one another, but whether it’s a woman’s picture, an action movie, a lovers-on-the-run, or a literary adaptation, there is an intensity, a swiftness, and a pictural power and clarity.

 

Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström, 1913): 3.5/5

No close-ups but still manages to be among the saddest and grimmest movies I’ve ever seen. The 20-minute passage where Ingeborg has to give away her children to foster homes, one by one, crying and waving: whew! Bergman is famously indebted to Sjöström (using him as an actor twice, including as the lead in Wild Strawberries), but this movie is much closer to Lars Von Trier's work, where he runs a woman through a grinder.

 

A Man There Was (Victor Sjöström, 1917): 4/5

An action movie, essentially, where our protagonist is fighting forces bigger than himself—not psychologically deep. Still the second half of the movie contains a tremendous emotional gut punch, real madness, and a harrowing action sequence on rough water. The acting in this sequence makes the connection between the madness of man and the madness of the sea. 

 

The Outlaw and his Wife (Victor Sjöström, 1918): 3.5/5

“The only law for them was their love.” A beautiful lovers-on-the-run movie. And of course, that’s a death trip, baby. The cliffs and waterfalls that make up the lovers’ garden of Eden period favorably compare to the tree house sequence in Badlands.

 

The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926): 5/5

Sjöström comes to America and becomes “Victor Seastrom.” The movie he makes is primal. When our lovers are falling in love, Dimmesdale is posed behind a hedge and Prynne appears to be leaning down to embrace the plants/earth themselves. When she tells him she is married, he is posed over the fireplace, flames licking his face. When he flees and she belatedly runs outside to stop him: nothing but snow. The emotional heart of the story is the public castigation when Prynne refuses to denounce Dimmesdale (no matter how he begs to be exposed), which here is played as a Calvary. The performances are thrilling, especially Gish, who is very still and very fierce.