Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

The Green Book (dir. Peter Farrelly, 2018). Two excellent actors — Mahershala Ali as the pianist Dr. Donald Shirley, Viggo Mortensen as Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, Shirley’s driver on a 1962 tour through the American south — stuck, alas, in a dreadful movie, full of clichés and cartoonish moments that permit no real consideration of the color line in American culture, or of what it might mean to live as a gay man on one side of that line. There’s a cringe-inducing insistence that each of the principals has something to learn from the other: “the doc” teaches Tony how to write good letters home; and Tony teaches “the doc” about fried chicken and R&B. What might be the corniest moment of all: Shirley, still in tails, sits down in a roadhouse to play Chopin before jamming the blues with the house band. It’s unfathomable to me that this film won the Oscar for Best Picture. ★★

*

Drive a Crooked Road (dir. Richard Quine, 1954). This was the Criterion Channel’s Columbia noir that I least looked forward to, thinking it would be about race cars. And it is, but only sort of. Mickey Rooney plays Eddie Shannon, a short, shy, horribly scarred auto mechanic and aspiring racer; Dianne Foster is Barbara Mathews, the glamorous woman who uses her influence to pull Eddie into a criminal scheme. Dig the mid-century modern interiors of the big party scene. ★★★

*

The Burglar (dir. Paul Wendkos, 1957). Not an especially good film, but an interesting one. Dan Duryea (b. 1907, playing a man who’s supposed to be thirty-five) engineers a jewel heist full of complications. Along
for the ride: an emoting gemologist, a dumb lug, and Jayne Mansfield (b. 1933) as a young woman who’s supposed to be just a few years younger than Duryea. Psychological hokum, snappy patter, location shots of Atlantic City and Philadelphia, and Martha Vickers in her next-to-last film appearance. ★★★

*

Experiment in Terror (dir. Blake Edwards, 1962). The experiment begins about twenty seconds after the opening credits end, and it never lets up, as a rapist and murderer (Ross Martin) presses a bank teller (Lee Remick) into stealing $100,000 — or else. Glenn Ford leads the FBI effort to catch the culprit. With excellent cinematography by Philip H. Lathrop, an atmospheric score by Henry Mancini, and strong HItchcock overtones (the bathroom and the ballpark). And in the Department of Wait, What?: this is the film that Blake Edwards directed just after making Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ★★★★

*

If Beale Street Could Talk (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2018). A story of familial love and romantic love, with two young people, Tish and Fonny (KiKi Layne and Stephan James), tangled in the cruelties and falsehoods of a criminal-justice system — make that a criminal justice-system. If Hollywood wanted to honor a film about color and American culture, this film, not The Green Book, would have been the appropriate choice. Or do films about color have to arrive at feel-good endings? The story this film tells (from James Baldwin’s novel) broke my heart. ★★★★

*

This Happy Breed (dir. David Lean, 1944). From a play by Noël Coward. The life of a married couple (Robert Newton and Celia Johnson), their children, friends and relations, joys and sorrows, minor and major, from 1919 to 1939. Very British (see the title, from Richard II), with stiff upper lips and many cups of tea. I wonder if this film might have been a secret influence on It’s a Wonderful Life: the Charleston scene got me thinking about that. ★★★★

*

The Room (dir. Tommy Wiseau, 2003). Rebecca Doppelganger, in Ghost World, evaluating the band at a graduation party: “This is so bad, it’s almost good.” Enid Coleslaw’s response: “This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.” Lacking the pep and pluck of an Ed Wood production, Tommy Wiseau’s cult film (starring Tommy Wiseau) seems to me just bad — banal, inane, stilted, witless, the product of a delusion of grandeur (see the moments of homage to James Dean and Orson Welles). This mysteriously financed story of love and friendship and betrayal is like dull outsider art. ★

*

The Disaster Artist (dir. James Franco, 2017). The story of The Room, with James and Dave Franco as Tommy Wiseau and best friend Greg Sestero (Johnny and Mark in The Room). Even a viewer who fails to see the appeal of The Room can enjoy this portrait of an auteur realizing his vision. My favorite moments: the movie premiere and the hilariously exact recreations of scenes from The Room. My favorite line, spoken by the auteur: “I have to show my ass or this movie won’t sell.” ★★★

*

Searching (dir. Aneesh Chaganty, 2018). A satisfying thriller with both predictable and unexpected and twists, as a father (John Cho) seeks clues to his daughter’s disappearance (Michelle La) by looking at what’s on her laptop and in her social media accounts. What makes the film unique is its approach to narrative: at every moment we ’re watching something on a screen: Facebook, Instagram, news reports, FaceTime calls, text messages, Google searches, YouTube videos, family photographs. It’s a highly inventive way to tell a story, one in which Set as Desktop Picture or Move to Trash takes on new and surprising meaning. Major props to Juan Sebastian Baron, Nicholas D. Johnson, and Will Merrick, the film’s cinematographers. ★★★★

*

On the Basis of Sex (dir. Mimi Leder, 2018). The early life and trials (pun intended) of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones). A reductive story of triumph that feels like a made-for-TV movie, with a blue and brown palette and lots of cigarette smoke to let us known we’re in “the past.” Justice Ginsburg deserves better, and she got it: the documentary RBG (dir. Betsy West and Julie Cohen, 2018). Watch that instead. ★★

*
Moonrise (dir. Frank Borzage, 1948). What a strange movie, we thought, before realizing that a Criterion Channel glitch was slowing down the audio. But even with proper playback, it’s a gloriously strange movie, a bewildering love story set against a backstory of a murderous parent (“bad blood”). Dane Clark and Gail Russell star, but minor characters steal the show: Rex Ingram as Mose, a sage hunter straight out of Faulkner, and Harry Morgan as Billy Scripture, a mute man fascinated by mirrors and pocket knives. Hurrah for the Criterion Channel: here’s the real meaning of that overused word curation. ★★★★

*

Watch on the Rhine (dir. Herman Shumlin, 1943). It’s 1940 in Washington, D.C., and the story is something like Casablanca in reverse, though you’ll have to watch to understand (no spoilers). Bette Davis, Paul Lukas, and George Colouris are outstanding as the leads. The film moves very slowly at first, with some pleasant scenes of train travel; the tension later rises sharply, though not quite enough to counteract the deliberate dialogue and overall staginess. Screenplay by Dashiell Hammett, from the play by Lillian Hellman. ★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

[There’s next to nothing said about in The Green Book about The Negro Motorist Green Book itself. If you’re curious, the New York Public Library can help. ]