• Trouble in Paradise

12/15/20 (Tues)

Finally a screwball comedy that doesn’t depend on impossible plot twists or unnaturally eccentric characters. Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 film offers a straightforward story delivered in exceptionally high style, including a fabulously quotable script and totally believable three-dimensional characters. It’s the closest I’ve seen an American show come to British drawing room comedy, albeit written by an American, Samson Raphaelson, based on a Hungarian play. It benefits from supremely confident performances by the three main performers, especially the unflappable Herbert Marshall as the sleekest of crooks, along with wonderful supporting character actors. The romantic settings of Venice and Paris, the social world of the high life – or low life pretending to be high life – and particularly the champagne banter are pretty near perfect. This is operetta in prose.

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• The Awful Truth

12/14/20 (Mon)

Leo McCarey’s 1937 screwball comedy classic. Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play a glamorous bickering couple who, each doubting the other’s fidelity, agree to a divorce, only to discover during the 60-day waiting period that they need each other after all.

The plot is dubious but is only there anyway as a framework for some fun characters and crackling dialogue in what amounts to an American restoration comedy. Continue reading →

• Cyrano, My Love (Edmond)

12/12/20 (Sat), Tokyo

A fanciful story of how Edmond Rostand came up with the idea of his blockbuster hit Cyrano de Bergerac back in 1897. With only three weeks to write the script, he draws inspiration from his own life to craft the show: he helps his handsome but inarticulate friend write love letters to a beautiful woman – ding! A black restaurant proprietor lashes out at a patron for being too timid and unoriginal in his “black” insults, offering him some more intelligent offerings before throwing him out – ding! The process is slow but steady, going from one disaster to another –   e.g. the gangster’s insistence on using a hard-to-handle actress, the star’s bumbling son in a key role, the threatened closure of the show, the female lead’s sudden incapacity on opening night – until the historic triumph with 40 curtain calls lasting an hour (that part appears to be true).

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• Caravaggio (Derek Jarman)

7/12/20 (Sun)

Jarman’s disjointed 1986 look at the tempestuous life of the revolutionary painter. Told in flashback as the painter is dying in exile, more or less in chronological order. Just enough is known about Caravaggio to create a broad framework while leaving details to the filmmaker’s fertile imagination. The painter notoriously employed street people, drunks and lower classes as his models for saints and religious paintings, and the film offers numerous tableaux where models are posing for famous paintings. He was not above selling his talents for money, but still maintained his striking lighting techniques and homoerotic subjects (the only examples shown here – where are the religious works?), which others are willing to overlook in recognition of his sheer talent. The painter’s sexual proclivities are all over the map: he hires a beautiful male model clearly with more than just drawing in mind, but when the model’s girlfriend comes along, he happily beds her as well, setting up a dramatic conflict.

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• Contagion

4/15/20 (Wed)

I wasn’t particularly eager at first to see this 2001 film about a killer virus and ensuing global panic since we’re living it at the moment. But strong recommendations from friends and curiosity got the better of me. I wasn’t even aware of the film until the past few weeks, when it’s suddenly become a very hot property. One thing that attracted me was that unlike the typical horror film about zombies or aliens, a virus is very real, making the story all too credible – and, it turns out, prescient. The first (and still one of the few) horror films I saw that really terrified me was Jaws since, while I don’t believe in devils, I do believe in sharks. Still, Contagion-wise, it remained to be seen how close Hollywood was willing to stick to the plausible as opposed to the dramatic.

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