Four Weddings and a Funeral

1994 romantic comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: It's in the title! Why do I have to do all the work for you?

Maybe it's other Hugh Grant movies from the 1990's, but in my memory of seeing this movie when it came out, he charmingly stammered a lot more. Despite the fact that anybody being that smitten with Andie MacDowell is a plot hole, this romantic comedy is almost as charming as Hugh Grant. Most of that is because of the work of Simon Callow as the jolly jackass Gareth. If I ever see this movie again, it will be because of that character's vests and sick dance moves.

Speaking of Andie MacDowell, I believe I saw something about her doing a nude scene in a movie that came out this year. That doesn't have anything to do with Four Weddings and a Funeral, but it seems like something worth mentioning, and when I did a survey about my blog writing a few years back, "things that were worth mentioning" was actually the most popular feature.

And speaking of Andie MacDowell, this is moment in this when she delivers a line ("Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed.") that completely ruins her performance and nearly ruins this entire movie. It's like Anakin Skywalker's delivery of that poorly-written crap about sand in Episode II or the younger Anakin Skywalker's delivery of that poorly-written crap about people looking like angels in Episode I. Now, poor MacDowell isn't given the best material to work with near the very end of this movie, a moment that's supposed to be full of all this big Hollywood-y romance, but her delivery makes this the type of thing an actor should not have been able to recover from.

I saw this movie in a theater when it came out, but I couldn't remember who got married in any of the weddings except the last one. I also couldn't remember whose funeral it was, but if it had been Andie MacDowell's character, it would have saved us all from having to hear that horribly-delivered line about the rain.

Is it just me or is it kind of difficult to root for Hugh Grant's character by the end of this movie? I mean, his dubious taste in women aside, he kind of pulls a dick move, right? Not even the movie's efforts to make his deaf brother a scapegoat really saves the character, does it?

I feel like I've been unnecessarily mean to Andie MacDowell. I hope she doesn't read this when she Googles herself to see if anybody remembers who the hell she is.

Quiz Show

1994 true-story drama

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 17/20)

Plot: A movie about the quiz show scandals of the 1950's.

It was awkward watching this with my wife and getting a little turned on during the cold open, a scene where Rob Morrow is spending time with a car salesman and a Chrysler is fetishized. I hope she didn't notice, mostly because she would have no idea whether it was the curves of that car or the curves of Rob Morrow that was giving me that bOner with a capital O.

Can you want both a movie to be a little shorter and for scenes where John Turturro is pretending to be a character pretending to stress out over quiz show questions to be longer at the same time? Man, Turturro is good! The more I think about that guy, the more I think he might be my favorite actor. The cast in this is great, including the shapely Rob Morrow even though I'm not totally sure about his accent. I can't remember if he sounded like that on Northern Exposure or not and if that's just the way he talks or that's not a way anybody has ever talked in the history of verbal language.

I love the first half of Robert Redford's movie. The subject intrigues, the villains have the right amount of shade, and the pace works. Near the end, things get a bit jumbled, but I like what this says about television. Well, maybe it's not about television and its role but about the consumer. Maybe that's why this movie starts with that sexy Rob Morrow and that sexy Chrysler.

Alice in the Cities

1974 road movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A writer runs into a mother and her young daughter at an airport and winds up in a situation where he's traveling around Europe with the latter because they can't find the former.

Maybe it's the influence of the late Robby Muller's cinematography, but this reminded me a lot of Jarmusch. There are some great looking shots in this one, my favorite being one where the camera watches a soaring bird from the Empire State Building. This is very much a movie about place and time, and these 1970's places--New York City, which I know, and some European cities that I don't know because in America we don't have to learn about other places--are captured beautifully by the Muller/Wenders team.

Rudigar Volger--an actor who's got a name like a spy B-movie villain--has this great developing rapport with young co-star Yella Rottlander--an actress who has a name like a freestyle rapper from somewhere in Africa. Early in their road trip, they are two people who are inhabiting the same general space. As their misadventures continue, they develop something that is very close to a relationship, albeit an ambiguous one. There's nothing disturbing or sexual about it, even less so than that Sundays and Cybele movie I recently watched, and there was never a time I thought young Alice was in any sort of danger or that Volger's character Phil had any sketchy ideas. I actually teared up a little during a scene with a telephone booth, one immediately followed by a cute little episode where the pair exercise together. The entire premise is a little bizarre because I can't imagine a mother thinking that leaving an eight-year-old with a scruffy writer/photographer for that long is a good idea, but the 70's were apparently a different time.

Rottlander is really good, simultaneously acting just like an eight-year-old (or however old she's supposed to be) would while having enough wisdom to help push some of the film's sneaky more profound ideas. This movie has a lot to do with time with characters losing all sense of time or having confusion about time zones. There's one fun moment related to time when Volger "blows out" the Empire State Building at midnight. This also throws out ideas about identity, the importance of pictures to prove something is real, the power of those pictures over words, the barbarism of television and its advertisements for the status quo, and fear. Houses like graves, pictures to know what one really looks like, and references to Volger's scribbling abound.

I was pretty excited to see that Can provided the score for this, but there's not much of a score. It's some recurring guitar noodling, and that's all I noticed. Canned Heat is used diegetically, and it's hard to complain about a movie that has both Can and Canned Heat. A very sweaty Chuck Berry also makes an appearance. My favorite musical moment, however, is this recurring shot of a kid wearing this awful vest and eating an ice cream cone while sitting next to a jukebox.

Bad Moms

2016 comedy

Rating: 8/20 (Jen: 15/20)

Plot: No.

This is what happens when I let my wife pick a movie for us to watch. It's typical for a mainstream comedy in the 21st Century, the kind of movie that attempts to shock us into laughter by being raunchy and loud but only succeeding in being, well, typical. There are lots of songs and some Arby's product placement.

I asked my wife how many times I laughed during Bad Moms, and she said it was five. I said, "No, it wasn't that many," and she answered, "You said you couldn't stop laughing, so it was probably more like twenty-five."

She doesn't get to pick movies anymore.

Three Colors: Red

1994 final movie in a trilogy and a dude's career

Rating: 19/20

Plot: A bubblegum model befriends a retired judge who has a filthy little secret hobby.

This final film of the trilogy is focused on fraternity, but there's a lot in this about chance, too. Allusions to coin flips and slot machines mix right in with discussions about characters being born at wrong times, something that as far as I know can't be controlled. This movie also has a lot of telephones, almost as many as Bresson's got doors in L'Argent. In fact, the film opens with a unexpected, surprisingly flashy journey along a telephone line to a phone that, if I'm remembering right, isn't answered. Of the three films, this one might be the flashiest actually. There aren't special effects, but the camera's movements have a way of making the viewer swoon, and there are all kinds of cleverly choreographed shots of these characters and what's going on in the backgrounds with these characters. One shot in which a car arrives and nearly runs into a camera that then rises up to peek into a character's apartment with a ringing telephone and then back down to show another character doing something before following another character into an apartment was one of many that just force you to pay close attention to see the ways these characters are connected.

You really have to pay attention to movies anyway, but this is a special case. There are so many clues in the seams.

Irene Jacob, who also starred in Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, is perfect here, and the great Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a judge, one of the more interesting characters I've seen in a movie in a long time. He plays this judge as a fragile and omniscient guy who may or may not enjoy owning a dog.

The way Kieslowski brings all the characters from the trilogy together in a climactic event at the end of this one might seem a little dopey, but it has an impact and even changes the ending of one of those movies. And a final shot, a callback to another shot, brought a tear to my eye, not because of anything emotional that was going on but just because it was a powerful punctuation point on a really powerful work of art.

A note: I saw these movies in the mid-90's when I was a just becoming a little more serious about movies. I didn't remember all the particulars of this movie, but of the three, it had the images that stuck in my mind the most.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

2018 sequel

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Ant-Man is trying to balance life as a criminal under house arrest and a father when he's forced to Ant-Man himself again to help out some former associates. Meanwhile, a glitchy girl and some other bad people try to get in the way.

Tim Heidecker has a cameo in this movie, and the Ant-Man connection with his lampooning On Cinema at the Cinema movie review show with Gregg Turkington is currently my favorite thing. Turkington had a bit role in the first Ant-Man movie, a source of jealousy for Heidecker's On Cinema character named Tim Heidecker. This time, Heidecker is Whale Boat Captain Daniel Gooobler although I'm not sure about the three O's in that surname. That's what it has on IMdB though. Anyway, the back and forth on Twitter with Heidecker and Turkington might actually be better than this movie

But the movie is a nice harmless shot of summer adrenaline without being an extension of the On Cinema cinematic universe. With Black Panther, a movie that managed to be about some very serious things, and Infinity War, Marvel in 2018 was bombastic and maybe a little depressing, Marvel probably needed something that was just fun.  By the time the credits have finished rolling, this does place itself in the overall Marvel timeline, but this is mostly just spirited adventure, confusing superhero hijinks, sketchy science fiction, and daffy humor.

I think I even laughed twice!

I've never thought Angeline Lilly has much charisma, but she works really well with Paul Rudd, who, out of all the actors working in Hollywood these days, is the most like Paul Rudd. Michael Pena steals nearly every scene he's in, and Michael Douglas, though very old, seems to be having a lot of fun being in a Marvel superhero movie. And if you close your eyes and think about what kind of slimeball Walton Goggins would be really good at playing, that's pretty much exactly what you'll get here. Michelle Pfeiffer, returning to the superhero genre, and Laurence Fishburne, returning to the movie-that-is-almost-entirely-special-effects genre round out a pretty impressive cast. Oh, and Hannah John-Kamen plays the glitchy girl, but she mostly lets the cool costume and the special effects do their thing. The five people who wrote this, including Ant-Man himself, have a great balance of humor and dramatic action here, and the two really mingle together well.

The special effects are also fun, the movie being one of those cases where the storyboarders are obviously having a good time making sure audiences will have a good time with these concepts. Lilly's Wasp does most of the heavy lifting in the action scenes for reasons I won't spoil, but both characters get some invigorating action sequences that never really got boring. There are scenes with superhuman characters kicking and punching each other like in every Marvel movie, but the particular powers of these characters made for some original fight sequences. The same goes with a lengthy action sequence involving a lot of cars. Ant-Man and the Wasp is well-paced fun.

You wouldn't want to watch this with a curmudgeonly scientist, I wouldn't think, because I'm fairly positive the scientific stuff is flawed. It's less sci-fi than it is fantasy-fi, but if you're not willing to suspend your disbelief with these superhero movies, I'm not sure what you're doing watching them anyway. There's all this stuff about the Quantum Realm which didn't make a ton of sense to me, but by the time certain characters get there, it's breathtakingly psychedelic. Lava lamp goops, strange creatures, all sorts of shapes that resembled the stuff I used to see under microscopes as a kid. That visit was a lot of nonsensical fun. And so was this movie.

This fits into the bigger picture with these Marvel movies, but I have kind of stopped caring about that.

What I care more about is the upcoming WhaleMan featuring Tim Heidecker. Look for that one in 2020.

Three Colors: White

1994 middle part of a trilogy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A spiteful guy tries to get even with his mean ex-wife.

This very nearly starts with a "What are those?" shoe gag a couple of decades before that became a popular meme.

This second film is different in a lot of ways to the other two in Kieslowski's trilogy. First, it's got a male protagonist despite what every single poster for the movie would have you believe. Julie Delpy's character is important in a sort of antagonistic way, but she is not the main character. It's Zbigniew Zamachowski's Polish immigrant Karol Karol who is the protagonist of this one. He's a great character, too. He's a complete dupe contrasted to Delpy's Dominique. While Karol Karol--a guy so nice, Kieslowski named him twice--is having pigeons shit on him or cradling toilets, Dominique is cruelly setting fire to her own salon or sharing her orgasmic joys over the phone with her ex-husband.

Second, the tone is much different. This doesn't have the same poetic quality of Blue or Red. And it's a comedy, although it's a very dark one. It's not that there aren't some great shots in this because there are. I especially liked one that shows Delpy's hair moving with her sleeping breaths. But this is much more of a traditional narrative than the other two. It's also got more of an Eastern European feel than its bookends, both which feel very French to me. That probably has a lot to do with who the main character is and where a lot of the action of the film takes place, but I think it also has to do with the pacing of the story.

Like the others, this is a warped look at a single theme. This time, it's equality, but it's a rather cynical look at what that means, at least in the context of a relationship between a man and a woman. And like the others, it's got a lot of shots featuring at least one item of the titular color, a scene in which an elderly person struggles to recycle a bottle, and a final shot that shows a character smiling and crying simultaneously.

While watching this, I was inspired to make a kazoo out of a comb and play it for money on the streets of Indianapolis. In just under five hours, I got two dollars and sixty-five cents, two cigarette butts, and a condom that was out of its wrapper.

The First Purge

2018 prequel

Rating: 13/20

Plot: The first purge.

Galatians 5:16: "Thou shalt not purge. Or go ahead and purge all you want. Yeah, go ahead and purge."

This movie, dealing with a government experiment allowing citizens to commit crimes for twelve hours, might inspire a viewer to consider what they would do in a similar situation. Put me in that cluster of people who would cower for twelve hours. I'm not creative enough to come up with a cool mask or anything, and I'm not as opportunistic as some of the folks in this movie who engage in a little light arson by setting off homemade bombs in the middle of the street and then hooting and hollering like the morons in my hometown who were playing with fireworks last week. Or the guys who take advantage of the opportunity to do some gnarly wheelies on dirt bikes or have sex outdoors.

My favorites are the trio of elderly women pushing shopping carts full of dolls, by the way. They turn out to be more diabolical than you'd expect during a fun scene with some poorly-executed movie explosions.

The best character is a terrifying over-the-top creep named Skeletor played by Rotimi Paul. This character is white America's worst nightmare. Along with the scary masks, Skeletor is the best representation of the visceral horrors in The First Purge. When this is effective as a sci-fi horror movie, it's because they do a good job making human beings these cartoonish monsters. A walk down an alley for one character is particularly strong in creating this sci-fi horror vibe, and the contacts that participants are required to wear give them this especially menacing look.

Of course, those are just the superficial horrors. The real horrors for some would be the allusions to the current presidential administration and their policies. It's not that anything Purge-like could actually be in America's future; it's more that it's not all that far off from policies that could be a part of America's future. Rhetoric about "reviving" America, rather than making it great again, and the American dream; the intentional use of a fictional president who is monosyllabic, a Chief of Staff who looks an awful lot like one Sean Spicer; and a bit of dialogue about a "pussy-grabbing motherfucker" all make this timelier than it ever should have been. I'm shocked that the makers of this didn't include some tiki torches because there's one moment where seeing those would have been very effective.

And that clash of different kinds of horror might be where this thing's lost its mind a bit. I'm not sure you can satirize the MAGA movement while at the same time using black people in an inner-city setting as some sort of monsters. Of course, that might be part of the subversive quality of this which might be a stroke of genius. I don't know enough about the work of director Gerard McMurray, who was an associate producer for Fruitvale Station, or writer James DeMonaco, who wrote and directed the other Purge movies, to really know what they're getting at there. The satire isn't exactly nuanced. I'm surprised they didn't have an orange president actually. I appreciated both the obvious (the KKK visuals) and the less obvious (the media's implication in this sort of thing), but there were times when this was closer to being a "greatest shit show on Earth" instead of something profound.

It does work as an action movie which is exactly what it either evolves or devolves into for the last third. Y'lan Noel looks the part of an action hero right from the start, a first shot showing us all what he looks like without a shirt if I'm recalling correctly. He's borderline invincible by the time we get to an action finale that recalls The Raid. There are more shoot-outs than in any other 2018 movie with the exception of the Sicario sequel, and while none of the action sequences show us anything new, they work well enough.

What doesn't work is probably everything else. Characters make decisions that really make you wonder what they're thinking about. The dialogue is often really bad, and I'd contend that any dialogue that takes place outside or in the middle of the street is a plot hole. There are far too many jump scares with loud noises, a cliche I'm really bored with. The proceedings are probably unnecessarily bloody. And there's product placement for Halloween, a movie reboot I'm assuming is another upcoming Blumhouse feature.

Oh, I forgot about another fun bit of criminal activity. One guy takes advantage of the 12-hours of lawlessness by getting himself a fish-head mask and running around with a squirt gun. You could do that without as much of a risk of being shot to death any time. This guy doing it on Purge night deserves some recognition, right?

This was an odd choice for Oscar winner Marisa Tomei.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

1943 war movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Clive Candy has a military career.

This is a propaganda film disguised as a moving look at lifelong friendship and unrequited love. Actually, it's not even disguised unless you're the type of person fooled by a faux beard made out of a teddy bear.

I might have respected this movie even more if I were British. It's odd to watch a movie and not feel like I have enough context even though everything's in English and all the characters are pasty white people.

Googling the Colonel Blimp comic this was inspired by, I was amazed that anything halfway entertaining could have been based on that.

Roger Livesey is really good here. They did a good job taking this actor through forty years of a guy's life.

This movie is in color.

Three Colors: Blue

1993 drama

Rating: 18/20

Plot: After a car crash claims the life of a famous composer and his daughter, his wife decides to withdraw from society.

There's a scene in this with a close up of a sugar cube. Kieslowski had to do research because the amounts of time the sugar cubes soaked up coffee ranged from three to eleven seconds, and the director needed it to happen in five seconds. You have to respect that attention to specific details and that artistic vision.

Kieslowski had his own film language, something he's experimenting with right here in this trilogy that finished his career. He's creating a tragedy focused on the idea of liberty, but it's a perverse sort of tragedy and a perverse look at that theme. Liberty, it seems, has more to do with a senile woman watching bungee-jumpers or tightrope walkers on an old television than anything that the average person can actually achieve. Kieslowski's experimentation is subtle, but it still brings a flash and, more importantly, really helps the viewer absorb the experiences with the main character. The most obvious cinematic touch is the director's use of fade-outs and fade-ins. You expect to fade out and then be carried to another scene, another setting, another character. The fade-outs are for comfortable transitions for the audience. Here, they're almost used for the character herself. We'll fade out and then immediately fade back in to see the character in the same exact position in the same exact location. The first time it happens, it's a little strange. When it happens twice more, you have to think about what it means. It's a nice trick, Kieslowski!

This is filled with lovely shots, some taking the William Carlos Williams wagon-and-chicken approach. Take that beach ball rolling away from a car accident, for example. Other shots give this a poetically otherworldly quality--a doctor reflected in Binoche's eye, the blue-tinted perspective from underneath a moving car, a close-up of Binoche watching a funeral, an old woman recycling a bottle (elderly people do that in each one of these color movies), a reflection in a spoon. Music's also vital to this, not just because the characters make their living creating it but because it enhances the visual experience. There's a recurring musical motif that manages to hit hard every single time. There's a great scene where Binoche's character is throwing away some music, and the sound mix there borders on cheesy but manages to really be effective. My favorite scene might be one where music is being composed, a scene that loses focus while instruments are being added and subtracted.

Juliette Binoche is wonderful. She injures a hand and threatens injury to teeth by eating a lollipop like my wife would. Binoche, as a character makes clear, is "not the type of woman a man cheats on or dumps," but it's not that she's just easy to look at in this movie. She's that, but she also brings a mystery in almost every expression and movement. There's a single moment when she breaks this stoic disconnect with a hearty laugh at a repeated punchline. And like all three of these movies, this ends with a simultaneous smile and tear.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

2018 sequel to a reboot or maybe a sequel to a sequel's sequel

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Dinosaurs! Chris Pratt!

All a blockbuster really needs anymore is a bunch of CGI dinosaurs and the charming Chris Pratt's dimples. My expectations for this were not high since 2015's Jurassic World bored me to literal tears, and I'm not even sure why I bothered to see this. However, it was two dumb hours of dumb entertainment, and dumb me was pleasantly surprised that it hooked me and kept my interest.

It really is dumb though. I've often admitted that I don't really understand how science works, but I'm fairly confident in saying that the people behind this movie don't understand how science works either. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a movie that requires you to not only suspend disbelief but also suspend disbelief at how much you're suspending disbelief. It's goofy movie science, the kind where the writers figured just sneaking a bunch of phrases that sound vaguely scientific will be enough for moviegoers, most of whom probably just decided to see the movie because they wanted to enjoy the comfortable chairs and the air conditioning anyway. It requires you to stop paying attention to the action sequences and imagine a world where armies, instead of using giant bombs that can flatten cities, use genetically-created dino-soldiers instead. The credits roll and you're still shaking your head at the implausibility that the characters who survive this actually survived this. There will be eye rolls, ladies and gentlemen. There will be eye rolls.

Not all of the characters survive this. The bad guys--and I don't think this is a spoiler because it's the same thing that happens in all these dinosaur movies--get what they deserve, and director J.A. Bayona and co-writers Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow seem to relish those deaths. There's one great (and dumb) scene where a dinosaur is bulldozing his way through a crowd of well-dressed people, and the way they're shown being flung around made me laugh a little. Whether they're being chomped in a single bite, torn to pieces, or stomped to death, these people really know how to show a blockbuster-hungry audience the consequences of being murderous or just plain greedy or overly ambitious. Or just underappreciative of the power of extinct animals.

This is really a movie about the set pieces, and there are some good ones. In fact, once the characters arrive on whatever fictional island the other movies took place on, this is almost relentless dinosaur bombast. An active volcano and carnivorous dinosaurs team up to put our heroes in perilous situation after perilous situation, but they survive because the charming Chris Pratt and his dimples can run faster than any human being who has ever run before. The movie then leaves that island, and we get to see the dinosaurs wreak havoc in much different setting that gives the whole thing a refreshing novelty.

The CGI dinosaurs don't always look great. They look best in the darkness and/or rain. Bryce Dallas Howard's character, during one of the moments where things slow down, reminisces about the first time she saw a dinosaur, the novelty of the experience and how it made her believe. The first Jurassic Park movie managed to do that for audiences. That novelty is gone. There are moments when there are probably twenty dinosaurs on the screen at the same time, but the child within me just shrugged. The excitement in this is seeing those dinosaurs in new ways, and the real special effects splendor is how the CGI blends with the settings. There's a clever use of shadows in this movie, and I liked how the settings were destroyed in this. Giving the CGI creations a very real impact on the mansion they're galumphing through made the whole dumb sequence of events feel a little more real, even as things fall into place at just the right moments in the most unrealistic ways imaginable.

You imagine actual human beings sitting around writing this and thinking, "There's no way the audience is going to buy this, right? Oh well, let's do it anyway."

The charming Chris Pratt and his band of good guys are all likable but generic characters. I was more excited about seeing the great Toby Jones. He's just as good as it gets. Ted Levine is given a stock tough guy to play, and if you've seen any movie at all, you'll know exactly what his intentions are and what will eventually happen to his character the moment you see him. And there's Jeff Goldblum in another small 2018 summer movie role. It seems he agreed to be in this only if he didn't have to shave and could sit down for all of his scenes and if the shooting schedule didn't interfere with the filming of his apartment commercials.

This is likely the second best of these Jurassic movies although I still can't remember if I've seen the third Jurassic Park movie. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm actually interested in a third installment in this dumb rebooted series. The semi-cliffhanger this one ends with looks like more of an opportunity for the franchise to take its CGI dinosaurs to places they've never been before and further explain just whose kingdom is falling.

And here's hoping for a sex scene with the charming Chris Pratt and his dinosaur Blue. I can't be the only one who thinks that's a terrific idea, right? Fan fiction likely already exists. I mean, the next trilogy can be about their offspring, right? I think we've already moved far away from Crichton's books, so they might as well start using some of the dinosaur erotica you can purchase through Amazon as source material.

It Happened One Night

1934 romantic comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A newsman and a spoiled woman fleeing from a rich father meet and fall in love in a 1930's movie way.

"When a cold mama gets hot, boy, how she sizzles."

It's always a surprise to me when I like any movie from the 1930s, my least favorite decade for cinema. When I do, they're usually either made by Chaplin or it's a romantic screwball comedy. This wasn't made by Chaplin, probably because he couldn't stand carrots, so it must be a romantic screwball comedy. It's at least screwballish.

I wonder if those MAGA folk long for a time like this, those days when calling somebody "hooey" really had an impact. Those days when a woman needed a male movie star to come to their physical, mental, and spiritual rescue. Those days when cold mamas would get hot and sizzle. I'm not MAGA folk, but I do appreciate glimpses of simpler times. It's fun watching a true movie star like Clark Gable fast-talkin' his way out of jams and engaging in passionate discussions about piggy-backing, hitchhiking strategies, and the differences in doughnut dunking. This is a time when people fell madly in love within a few hours, and it seems so much more complicated now. I mean, apps are even required these days. In a movie like this, it's hard not to appreciate the banter, the kind craved by moviegoers still getting used to talkies and craving that sort of thing. It's hard to imagine anybody ever talking like the characters in this movie, banter that often makes them seem borderline schizophrenic.

My favorite moments in this might be when characters burst into song. It Happened One Night isn't a musical, but there's a fantastic sing-a-long during a bus trip with "Man on the Flying Trapeze." I've been on exactly one fairly lengthy bus ride, from Indianapolis to Knoxville, and it was one of the most excruciating experiences of my entire life. Maybe a spontaneous sing-a-long would have eased my pain, just like it had to have for these people trudging through a Great Depression. If I'm ever on a bus again, I'm going to get a sing-a-long going.

More musical moments involved Danker, a jovial fellow who picks the couple up when they're hitchhiking. He sings about "hitchhiking on the highway of love," how "people in love are very seldom hungry," and even his tonsils, all extemporaneously. Although this character later reveals himself to be a real son of a bitch, I'd imagine it would be difficult to be too angry at the guy. who can freestyle croon like Danker. "Shucks, that singing motherfucker is driving off with our luggage and leaving us in a pickle? What a load of hooey!"

I'm not sure if there's any real chemistry between Gable and Claudette Colbert or not, but they're both likable enough. Colbert's best moment has more to do with Capra's hammy direction than anything she's doing--a great end to a scene where it fades to black except for a single tear. As always, I did my best to imagine the two of them having sex since it's not something that's typically shown in a 1930's romantic comedy, and it didn't keep me up very long. I would have been fairly benign sex, I'd think, but maybe you'd expect more when their foreplay involves a trumpet.

People with toy trumpets are very seldom horny.

The above fact about Charlie Chaplin having something against carrots is likely made up. You should look that one up before trying to impress somebody with this bit of Chaplin trivia.

Monsoon Wedding

2001 dramedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Wedding.

I don't even like weddings, so I'm not sure why I thought I'd enjoy a movie about one.

Guns on the Clackamas: A Documentary

1995 mockumentary

Rating: 8/20

Plot: This details the troubled shoot of a Western.

My enjoyment of his animated work varies wildly, but as a fan of mockumentaries and movies about movies, I thought I'd give this non-animated Plympton work a spin. Maybe I was hoping for a hidden gem, like The Making Of. . .And God Spoke. Unfortunately, this is a clumsy and largely unfunny mockumentary, the kind of thing I think I could have made with a thousand bucks and a group of friends if I had either a thousand bucks or friends.

No-budget films can be embraced if the ideas are good enough, but this movie is short on ideas and dollars. Juvenile cheap attacks on political correctness and and religion and the avant-garde are fish-in-the-barrel shots. And while there are ideas that might have been fleshed out into something semi-humorous--yodeling, for example, is always funny--most of the humor in this is too obvious and/or half formed. Obvious musical cues; references to alien abduction, psychics, and bestiality; film snob criticism; soiled underpants; and a plot point involving bad breath are the worst offenders. Some the budget shortcuts (the day/night scene almost got me), backward noodle eating, all the fun ways to continue filming with dead actors, and even the stuttering are things that might have worked in better hands, but Bill Plympton's hands were not those hands.

One  character talks about the "spiritual stench" of the movie being made. I wouldn't go as far to say this movie has a "spiritual stench," but I would probably rather watch 80 minutes of the film-within-a-film called "Frog Cowboys" before watching this again.

Gus Van Sant makes an awkward cameo in this for some reason.

Sundays and Cybele

1962 drama

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A 30-year-old war veteran befriends a young girl who was dropped off at a boarding school by a father who never intends to return.

Trees all over this movie, and I'm not sure exactly what the significance is.

This is a gorgeous movie, and depending on your perspective, a beautiful relationship. It's impossible not to watch this and think of pedophilia, wonder about Pierre's intentions with this 12-year-old child, give the whole thing the same side-eye that a lot of the characters putzing around the lake give these characters. It is difficult to pinpoint just what Pierre's intentions are as he pretends to be this girl's father and takes her on these idyllic Sunday playtime dates. Knowing that he's tortured by the war experience shown in the strange cold open, one that uses some stock footage and wild editing that sharply contrasts with the rest of the film, you know there's some psychological damage that has made him regress to an almost childlike state. So at times, he and Cybele are equals, nothing more than buddies. At other times, he's a father figure or ironically somebody who seems like her child or her patient or even her jealous lover.

Any ambiguity created here is partially the result of the two performances. Pierre's played by a guy with a great name--Hardy Kruger--and he plays the character with this perpetual stupor. There's something very close to genuine love on his face in the scenes when he's with Cybele, and at least for me, he was never threatening at all. That might be because of the terrific performance of Patricia Gozzi though. She was really 12 when this was made, and there's this surprising depth and balance to the performance where she's simultaneously as immature as a 12-year-old should be while having this mysterious wisdom. There's an innocent manipulation that goes both ways here.

The rest of the ambiguity comes from Serge Bourguignon painting such beautiful cinematic poetry. This is a visual feast, and it all comes so effortlessly. A shot in a rearview mirror, an elevator, a window with tree reflections superimposed over the characters, a steeple cock shot, playing around with lights, all those water ripples, a foggy daydream that isn't a dream at all, dinner party guests seen through an empty glass, horses watched from a spot in a fogged-up window, a merry-go-round chicken, a fishbowl-headed clairvoyant, a crystal ball zoom. At times, it's impossibly dreamy, making the whole thing a tragic fairy tale.

Bourguignon didn't make much else, but the Criterion release of this had a documentary short about monks that I also watched and enjoyed. It was called Le Sourire (The Smile). It's got a lot of beautiful shots, too, so many that it's hard to see this as a documentary. It's very directed, if you know what I mean. It is a touching little slice-of-life story and look at Buddhism though. There's one particularly mind-blowing shot of a leaf and a tree that I enjoyed. And all the smiles, of course.