6/30/24 (Sun)
Koreeda’s 2009 flick, an oddity in his ouevre, is on the surface about the life and death of a blowup sex doll. But it proves much more than that. (Air Doll is a literal translation of the Japanese title. Trivia: non-inflatable plastic sex dolls in Japan are known as Dutch wives, which my American friend never tired of mentioning to his Dutch wife.)
6/7/24 (Fri)
Richard Michell’s 2020 comedy is a charmer. It’s based on the incredible true story of the theft in 1961 of a heralded Goya painting from London’s National Gallery just days after its acquisition. Writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman delve into the circumstances behind the case. The painting had been purchased by the British state for a princely sum just weeks earlier to keep it in the UK after an American attempted to buy it, so its loss from the tightly guarded state-run museum was a national embarrassment.
The incident was apparently headline news at the time, coming unbelievably 50 years to the day – almost to the minute – of the more famous pilfering of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. That coincidence and the apparent sophistication of the operation (based on the assumption that security was doing its job) led to widespread speculation that the robbery was carried out by an international syndicate; it featured in the first James Bond film, Dr. No a year later, where Bond does a double-take upon seeing the missing painting in the villain’s lair. The riddle remained when the painting was mysteriously returned in perfect condition in a train station locker four years later, but the museum became even more red-faced when the thief, turning himself in six weeks later after careless pub talk left him open to blackmail, proved to be an eccentric, disabled and overweight former bus driver with the odd name Kempton Bunton.
6/4/24 (Tues)
A French friend had raved about Jacques Demy’s 1970 musical fantasy and practically insisted that I watch it. The director’s earlier Umbrellas had been not only a joyous burst of song and color but a unique approach to musical film, so it didn’t take much persuading to watch this one. I had never heard of it, but it’s apparently a cult classic in France. It’s based on a fairy tale by Charles Perrault, author of, among others, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, all of which feature in this film in some form or other.
5/30/24 (Thurs)
I kept having déjà vu as I watched this, making me think I’ve seen it before. Apparently, though, my mind was playing tricks on me as the film reportedly had only limited release at the time and has never been shown publicly since. Peter Jackson’s three-part remix of the rest of the intended documentary footage, called Get Back, inspired a re-release of the film for the first time in more than half a century.
5/29/24 (Wed)
The title of Koreeda’s superior 2008 film is taken from Ishida Ayumi’s old pop hit “Blue Light Yokohama”. It literally means “regardless of how much [one] walks” or “despite walking and walking”, the implication here being that the person will never reach the destination. The song itself features in the film in a startling confession muttered off-handedly by the mother.
5/23/24 (Wed)
Walter Lang’s unfortunate 1960 adaptation of the Paris-based Broadway musical hit of seven years earlier. Continue reading
5/7/21 (Fri)
Fellini’s fantastically uplifting 1957 film, with an astonishing performance by his wife and muse Giulietta Masina, fresh off the previous year’s La Strada. I watched the film mainly as the source material for Sweet Charity, which turns out to have followed the bare bones of the plot fairly closely. But the musical turned the lead into a dance hall girl and played her tribulations mainly for laughs, whereas the film’s Cabiria is a girl of the streets in a gritty post-war Rome still getting back on its feet. Continue reading
5/17/24 (Fri)
Bob Fosse was evidently a controversial choice as director of this 1969 work, never having helmed a film before, but he had ample Hollywood experience as a dancer and was championed by Shirley MacLaine, who had gotten her break in the Fosse-choreographed Pajama Game. Plus, of course, he had staged and choreographed the Broadway version of this show to tremendous success just a few years earlier. Stories of his battles over the film with the powers-that-be could be a book on their own, but his vision ultimately prevailed. A pity.
5/14/24 (Tues)
Michael Roemer famously lacked confidence in his 1971 film and didn’t release it until 1989, by which time the world had changed considerably. If nothing else, his film is a valuable and nostalgic timepiece capturing Jewish life in New York in the late 1960s to early 1970s.
5/1/24 (Wed)
Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2018 film reinvents the relationships between England’s 18th-century Queen Anne (a tremendous Olivia Colman) and two confidantes, cousins Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Emma Stone), who vie to displace one another as the monarch’s favorite. The queen bears various ailments that leave her unable to walk steadily and doesn’t always appear to be entirely on the ball. Often in a moody state, she tends to anger when she sees people enjoying themselves, often screaming at them to stop. Her infirmities leave her dependent on her aides. Which is where the conflict comes in.
The movie revolves largely around the war of tongues among the dueling cousins, both in their verbal sparring and more literal use on the queen in the bedroom. While the characters are loosely based on history, Lanthimos ups the lesbian quotient significantly, though for their part, the cousins, both comfortably married, use sex purely as a weapon to win over the sovereign (who at one point praises how Abigail “puts her tongue in me”).
4/30/24 (Tues)
Adaptations of Graham Greene’s typically convoluted plots range from the supreme (The Third Man) to the ridiculous (This Gun for Hire), so I didn’t know what to expect here. Moreover, I had read that the script of Fritz Lang’s 1944 flick, based on Greene’s book of the previous year, was considerably rewritten to the director’s intense displeasure after he signed a bad contract. Greene himself reportedly disapproved of the completed film due to some significant deviations in theme. I was ready for anything.
4/18/24 (Thurs)
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1947 fantasy was based on a female-authored book released two years earlier. I knew the title from the short-lived TV series back in the 1960s, but that played the situation for laughs. The film takes a more romantic approach.
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