One series, eleven movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Max, TCM, Tubi, YouTube.]

Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals (dir. Sharon Liese, 2023). “I was born and raised in a strict religious environment, or as most people would call it, a cult”: so says one interviewee in this documentary series. Women who were raised in Independent Fundamental Baptist households speak their piece: about patriarchy and pedophilia, about preachers with the power of mini-gods, about schools (so called) that are, in effect, prisons, and about the effort to speak out and get justice. Given one woman’s account of languishing in an isolation room and wondering why God would let that happen to her, I would have liked to hear these women speak about their present religious belief or lack thereof — it seems an urgent matter to address. Harrowing stuff, and there are many reasons to proceed with caution, or not at all. ★★★ (M)

*

Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987). Two days and nights in Brooklyn Heights, as the moon gets in everybody’s eyes. At the center of the story, the Castorinis: a father (Vincent Gardenia) having an affair, a mother (Olympia Dukakis) sensing that he is, a grandfather (Feodor Chaliapin Jr., son of the great bass) devoted to his dogs, and a daughter, Loretta (Cher), who’s about to marry a diffident yet boorish fellow, Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). And then there’s Johnny’s estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage), whom Johnny asks Loretta to invite to the wedding — and heck, everyone knows this movie already, right? Wonderful Italian-American stuff, never piled on too thick. ★★★★ (T)

*

Underworld U.S.A. (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1961). A great late noir, with Cliff Robertson as Tolly Devlin, who at fourteen sees unknown gangsters beat his father to death, continues in his own life of crime, and now, in his thirties, is prepared take revenge. Economical, fast-paced storytelling at first, but things get bogged down later with endless scheming. Standouts in the supporting cast: Beatrice Kay as a surrogate mom, Robert Emhardt as a crime boss with a sun lamp, and Dolores Dorn as Cuddles, a low-level drug runner who dreams of a new life with Tolly. I love the bare and utterly unrealistic streetscapes: watching the action, I know that it’s taking place in the movies. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Window (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). From a story by Cornell Woolrich. I could watch this movie again and again, for its tenement apartments, narrow staircases, fire escapes, and its sense of the city as a secret maze best navigated by children. It’s a fable, a cautionary tale about a boy (Bobby Driscoll) given to making up stories, and who finds his parents and the police skeptical when he announces that he’s just seen someone murdered. It’s beyond sad that Driscoll would be found dead at the age of thirty-one in an abandoned building — the very setting for much of the action here. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The City of the Dead (dir. John Llewellyn Moxey, 1960). I found it in a list of great B-movies. Perhaps not great, but it teems with atmosphere and unease. The premise: a college professor (Christopher Lee, yikes) directs a diligent college student (Nan Barlow) to a Massachusetts village to further her research on witchcraft in colonial America — a village that appears to be made of fog, gravestones, and strange voices. If you admire Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), you’ll likely admire this movie, which might be one of Harvey’s influences. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Bad Education (dir. Cory Finley, 2019). Based on the true story of Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), a school superintendent who with his assistant Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) defrauded a high-achieving Long Island district of millions. That’s no spoiler: the real surprises here come in the way that the truth, with all its complications, emerges, as Rachel Bhargava, a student-reporter for the school paper (Geraldine Viswanathan), begins to ask awkward questions. (Here is Rebekah Rombom, the real-life model for the student-reporter, on her role in breaking the news of the scandal (gift link).) My favorite moments: the visit to Park Avenue, the call to the “consulting firm.” ★★★★ (M)

*

So Well Remembered (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1947). It feels like two movies, both taking place as the war in Europe comes to an end, and neither to be missed. One is the story of a crusading newspaper editor and former member of Parliament (John Mills) who looks back on his life in journalism and public affairs; the other, the story of a man (John Mills) who looks back on the damage wrought across three generations by an ambitious heiress (Martha Scott). The political and the personal merge in unexpected ways in this movie, long believed lost, and recovered by a member of the Macc Lads, a punk band from Macclesfield, England, where the movie’s exteriors were shot. With Trevor Howard as an alcoholic doctor and Richard Carlson as an RAF pilot. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Dangerous (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1935). “I’m bad for people,” says Joyce Heath (Bette Davis), once a icon of the American theater (modeled on Jeanne Engels), now a shambles of an alcoholic who’s convinced that she’s a jinx who brings harm to anyone she comes close to. Aiming to bring her back to stardom is Don Bellows (Franchot Tone), a suave architect who renounced life as a banker after seeing Heath on the stage. Their relationship takes two wild turns late in the movie (Elaine called them both), but the story then speeds to a sudden, ultra-sappy resolution. Great performances (Davis won an Oscar), clichéd script, and it’s fun to wonder what this movie might have been before the Code. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Black Friday (dir. Arthur Lubin, 1940). The two cultures, the humanities and the sciences: when gangster Red Cannon (Stanley Ridges) and courtly old professor of English George Kingsley (Stanley Ridges) are the victims of a drive-by shooting, Dr. Ernest Sovac (Boris Karloff), Kingsley’s best friend, works a miracle by saving Kingsley’s life with a transplant of the gangster’s brain. No wonder the revived professor occasionally morphs into Red, losing his pince-nez and acquiring slicked-down hair and a chalk stripe suit. What’s odder: even though he now has Red’s brain, the professor can still recite swaths of English poetry. Bela Lugosi plays a gangster, but the real star of the movie is the fellow who gets third billing: Stanley Ridges, who really seems to be two actors. ★★★ (YT)

*

A Matter of Life and Death (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946). A deeply strange and deeply moving story that begins with an RAF pilot, Peter Carter (David Niven), at the controls of a burning plane, talking with surnameless radio operator June (Kim Hunter), giving her some last words to convey to his mother and sisters. Peter, it appears, has been scheduled to die, but he doesn’t, due to an error in the workings of an undefined great beyond, and still alive, he promptly meets up with and falls in love with June. When a representative of the beyond demands that Peter come along so that the books remain properly balanced, a celestial trial begins, with Peter and June’s future in the balance. Extraordinary imagination, extraordinary celestial set design, and, in the aftermath of World War II, extraordinary pathos in the scenes of all those service members making their way into the world beyond. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1956). I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jane Russell in a movie, and I’m happy to know from this one that she could act. Here she plays Mississippi-born Mamie, who we’re meant to understand is a sex worker, forced by the police to leave San Francisco, determined to make a new life in Honolulu, where she’s hired as a hostess at a dance hall (with a hallway of private rooms behind a curtain). Mamie’s life is complicated by a romance with a serviceman and writer (Richard Egan) who’s determined to take her away from the life she’s leading. The dance hall’s proprietor, Bertha Parchman (Agnes Moorehead) — named for the prison farm? — has other ideas. ★★★★ (CC)

*

American Fiction (dir. Cord Jefferson, 2023). Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a Black American writer and professor who who draws upon ancient materials (The Frogs, The Persians) for his novels, and he’d like those novels to be shelved in the Fiction section of the bookstore, not in African-American Studies. With a mother (Leslie Uggams) sinking into dementia and needing memory care, Monk hits upon a scheme to make some money: like Jim Trueblood in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, he will give a white audience what it wants: a story of dysfunction, sorrow, and violence, presented to a publisher as the work of a fugitive ex-con writing under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. And the white folks love it, with predictable and unpredictable results. I loved this movie for its cutting comedy and its depiction of a family both whole and scarred — and now I need to read Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. ★★★★ (V)

[I take back what I wrote about The Holdovers: I now think that American Fiction might be the best new movie I see all year. Here is the bookstore scene, filmed in what I immediately recognized as Brookline Booksmith, posing as a chain store.]

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Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, TCM, Vudu, YouTube.]

Two Trains Runnin’ (dir. Sam Pollard, 2016). This documentary looks back at events in Mississippi in the summer of 1964: the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and the efforts of two trios of white blues fanatics to find Son House and Skip James. The two trains, or narrative threads — racist brutality and music — never quite come together, despite a coda about the relationship between music and political change. And the contemporary performances that crop up between interviews and documentary footage ring painfully false: musicians in costume (hats, overalls) offering sad approximations of music they no doubt love (“Freight Train” is the worst). Best moments: Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Newport Folk Festival, playing “Shake ’Em On Down” as dancers move about him; Skip James, also at Newport, unfilmed but caught in photographs, singing “Devil Got My Woman” — a moment of high art that the filmmakers treat with the reverence it merits. ★★★ (YT)

[Gotta point out: Henry Vestine and Alan Wilson, both of whom figure in the story, were founding members of Canned Heat. Why’d they leave that out?]

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Gothic Noir feature

When Strangers Marry (dir. William Castle, 1944). Elaine thinks parts must have been left on the cutting-room floor; I think this B-noir is more subtly constructed than we first suspected. It’s the story of an Ohio waitress, Millie (Kim Hunter), who marries a salesman (Dean Jagger) after three dates and follows him to the big city (New York), only to find that he’s not in town and that she doesn’t really know what he’s all about. Robert Mitchum plays another salesman, a former suitor eager to lend Millie a hand. Strong overtones of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and a bonus: what must be the most consequential mail chute in all film. ★★★★

The Sign of the Ram (dir. John Sturges, 1948). Intense psychodrama in a big old house, and something of a twin to Guest in the House (dir. John Brahm, 1944), in which a newcomer to a family undermines relationships. Here it’s a second wife, Leah St. Aubyn (Susan Peters), who does the damage: paralyzed from the waist down after saving two step-children from drowning, she mistrusts her husband (Alexander Knox), fears the imagined wiles of her new secretary (Phyllis Thaxter), undermines her older step-children’s romances with appalling lies (thereby keeping the children from leaving her), and gets a steady narcissistic supply from her youngest step-child, all while writing sentimental verse for newspaper publication. This movie was Susan Peters’s first and last after the hunting accident that left her paralyzed. Her performance here suggests a great loss to film. ★★★★

Lightning Strikes Twice (dir. King Vidor, 1951). Actress Shelley Carnes (Ruth Roman) travels to a dude ranch for her health and falls in love with local rancher Richard Trevelyan (Richard Todd), just acquitted of murdering his wife. But if he didn’t do it, who did? Zachary Scott plays Trev’s lecherous friend; Mercedes McCambridge does lots of emoting as the co-owner of the dude ranch. The confusing directions for driving to the ranch suggest to me the problem with the movie: too many odd, puzzling points — why, for instance, does an old ranching couple have an enormous portrait of Trev above their fireplace? ★★★

*

The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne, 2023). It’s 1970, and Paul Giamatti is Paul Hunham, a teacher of classics at a Massachusetts boarding school, bowtied, lazyeyed, pedantic, pompous, and punished by being assigned to watch over the small band of students stuck at the school over the Christmas and New Year’s break. One of them: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart, rebellious student beset by family woes. Also wintering over: Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), head cook, and the mother of a recent graduate. All I’ll say is that The Hoidovers is the kind of movie that I’m willing to follow wherever it goes — it’s just that good, and I suspect it might be the best new movie I see all year. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

Outside the Law (dir. Jack Arnold, 1956). This year I’ve seen movies about Johnnies: Johnny Saxon, Johnny Eager, and here’s Johnny Salvo (Ray Danton), a paroled con and war hero, up for a pardon if he helps catch a gang of counterfeiters. Nothing much to see here, but son-father conflict (Danton and Judson Pratt) and a love-hate triangle add some interest, and the musical score — from five composers, including Henry Mancini — is consistently interesting. But for a story focused on tracking down the sources for the counterfeiters’ materials, there’s mighty little on the screen about paper. My favorite line: “Come on, Bormann, firms twice your size don’t use half the stationery you do!” ★★ (YT)

*

Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1943). The story of a serial killer, Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten), paying a visit to his sister’s family in Santa Rosa, the Newtons: Joe (Henry Travers), Emma (Patricia Collinge), and their three children, most especially, young Charlie (Teresa Wright), the namesake who shares a deep bond with her glamorous uncle. I never tire of this movie. Watching it this time, I paid attention to the ways in which Thornton Wilder’s screenplay keeps the viewer off balance, making it possible to forget now and then that Uncle Charlie is — hey, wait a minute! — a serial killer. My favorite scene, forever: the library at closing time. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Steel Trap (dir. Andrew Stone, 1952). Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright as a married couple, Jim and Laurie Osborne, with the weirdness factor lessened by Wright’s changed appearance (her hair is blonde) and her minimal role. It’s really a one-actor movie, with Cotten as an assistant bank manager whose interior monologue lets us into his plan to make off to Brazil (no extradition) with his wife and a heavy suitcase of cash from the vault. He has one weekend to pull it off before the bank switches to its winter hours: he must develop a persuasive story to tell his wife (a weekend getaway to manage a big bank deal), arrange care for his young daughter (who is supposed to follow), and obtain passports and schedule flights, with contingencies complicating his scheme at every turn. The movie has lots of suspense (certainly at least a four-dollar-rental’s worth) and strongly suggests that anyone is capable of becoming a criminal: “We have only so many days, so many hours, so many minutes to live, and we’re suckers if we don’t cram into them all the happiness we can get away with, regardless of how we do it.” ★★★ (V)

[I learned about this movie from Jerome Wesselberry’s review of Shadow of a Doubt. Jerome, whoever she is (the name is an alias), is a very smart watcher of movies. Thanks, Steven, for recommending her channel.]

*

The Bottom of the Bottle (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1956). Joseph Cotten as Pat Martin, “P.M.,” an Arizona attorney and rancher. He’s stuck in a loveless (and likely sexless) marriage to Nora (Ruth Roman), and he’s now confronted with the unexpected arrival of his brother Donald (Van Johnson), a convict and recovering alcoholic who’s escaped from Joliet (which everyone pronounces as Jolly-ette). Too many histrionic moments, but strong performances from Johnson and Roman. Cotten does a good job of suggesting just how much of his family history he’s been trying to forget: “Spend your life building up something worthwhile, and along comes the past.” ★★★ (YT)

*

Come Live with Me (dir. Clarence Brown, 1941). Modern marriage: a publisher and his wife are both having affairs — he with Johnny Jones (Hedy Lamarr), a Viennese emigre about to be deported unless she marries. Enter Bill Smith (Jimmy Stewart), a down-and-out writer willing to marry Johnny in exchange for a chunk of money. But can these two ever really fall in love? Yes, Hedy Lamarr is astonishingly beautiful, as Bill points out, but walking away with the movie is Adeline De Walt Reynolds as Bill’s wise old grandmother, who makes everything come out right, and it’s in her pastoral world that Bill recites, sort of, a bit of Christopher Marlowe’s poem. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Four Daughters (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1938). Sweet nonsense, mostly, with Claude Rains as a music master with four unmarried musical daughters (Lola Lane, Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, and Gale Page). A variety of eligible men are on and off the premises, the most charming of whom is a composer (Jeffrey Lynn), the most interesting of whom is an embittered pianist and orchestrator (John Garfield, in his first film role) who grows fond of the pluckiest sister, Emma (Priscilla Lane). Things get surprisingly dark as the movie nears its end, before everything turns to sweet nonsense once again. A bonus: lots of Gershwinesque music at the piano, the work (I think) of Max Rabinowitz and Heinz Roemheld. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Razor’s Edge (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1946). “The road to salvation is difficult to pass through, as difficult as the sharp edge of a razor”: so says an anonymous Indian holy man (Cecil Humphreys), paraphrasing the Upanishads, in this adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel. There, and here, a traumatized WWI veteran, Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power) sets out in search of the meaning of life, working as a laborer yet hobnobbing with a wealthy set (Anne Baxter, John Payne, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, with Herbert Marshall as Maugham, a wise elder passing through now and then). Tragedies befall the set, as Larry keeps his eye on the prize — which is what, exactly? On the one hand this movie feels like sheer malarkey; on the other it’s an assembling of great performances, particularly from Baxter and Tierney. ★★★★ (TCM)

[The movie’s themes were timely: “There was a surge of American GIs joining monasteries after the end of the Second World War, seeking solace and refuge in a violent and increasingly complicated world.” Here’s a short film about the last days of an American Trappist monastery founded by 1947 as a daughter house of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani (where Thomas Merton was a monk).]

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All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, Fandango, PBS, YouTube.]

Chicago Syndicate (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1955). Another movie with a highly improbable premise: an accountant with a military background (Dennis O’Keefe) is persuaded to go undercover to expose the racketeer who has just ordered the murder of his accountant. What makes this movie worth watching: Paul Stewart as a misogynist racketeer, Abbe Lane as a nightclub singer and racketeer’s moll, Xavier Cugat as a bandleader on the edges of the criminal world, and Allison Hayes as a wrench in the mob’s works. A bonus: lots of Chicago streets, and a visit to the Field Museum. An extra bonus: the Chicago freight tunnels. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Cash on Demand (dir. Quentin Lawrence, 1961). A duet, with Peter Cushing as priggish bank manager Harry Fordyce, and André Morell as “Colonel Gore Hepburn,” a bank thief posing as an insurance investigator. The colonel’s fiendish scheme has elements that compel Fordyce to become an accomplice in crime. Suspense abounds as the two open a safe and load suitcases with money. I won’t say how the movie ends, but I will point out that Fordyce more than slightly resembles Scrooge and that the events of the movie take place right before Christmas. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Dark Tower (dir. John Harlow, 1943). Three nominal stars, but the movie belongs to the fourth-billed Herbert Lom as Torg, a swarthy fellow who materializes at a traveling circus and talks the manager (Ben Lyon) into a job hypnotizing star aerialist Mary (Anne Crawford) into performing sans a balancing prop. And yes, Torg has designs on Mary, which doesn’t please her partner Tom (David Farrar). Considerable circus atmosphere, with real performers. The story seems to me to take place in the weird imaginary Europe of, say, The Lady Vanishes. ★★★ (YT)

*

A little Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti festival

Sideways (2004). From a fambly discussion, 2010:

“Wait till you’re older. Then you might like it.”

“I am older.”

I wrote in a 2010 post that you have to be at least forty to like Sideways, but now I think that thirty-five is right. ★★★★ (DVD)

The Holdovers (2023). I wrote four sentences about this movie earlier this year. All I want to add here is that the movie’s sentimentality, even corniness (as in the candlepin bowling scene), merits appreciation. The sadness and snow might make The Holdovers my favorite Christmas movie. And as I noticed once again, there’s even an homage to A Charlie Brown Christmas (no kidding). ★★★★ (F)

*

Among the Living (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1941). We watched because it’s a movie with Frances Farmer, who made only sixteen film appearances. But she’s hardly on screen here. The real interest comes from Albert Dekker in a double role (mad twin, sane twin), Harry Carey as a doctor with dubious ethics and a hilarious accent, and Susan Hayward as a boarding-house owner’s daughter who doesn’t realize it’s the mad twin who’s buying her gifts and stealing her heart. Dekker is disturbingly (insanely?) convincing: it’s sometimes difficult to believe the same actor is playing both his roles. ★★★ (YT)

*

Jack Goes Boating (dir. Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010). Hoffman’s only directing effort, from a play by Robert Glaudini. It’s the story of two couples: Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) are in a relationship whose foundation has sustained considerable damage; Jack (Hoffman) and Connie (Amy Ryan) are naifs barely getting started. Their tentative beginning looks back to Delbert Mann’s Marty and perhaps served to influence Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. Alas, the movie jumps a big shark in the dinner scene and never quite recovers. ★★★ (CC)

*

The Price of the Ticket (dir. Karen Thorsen, 1989). A documentary about James Baldwin, with archival footage in abundance, and Baldwin speaking truth with a fierce hope about human possibility: “the bottom line,” he says, is that all men are brothers. Considerable commentary from Maya Angelou, Baldwin’s bother David, and others. The most unexpected moments: David and Bobby Short singing spirituals, as they once did with James. This documentary aired as an episode of the PBS series American Masters. ★★★★ (PBS)

*

The Last of Sheila (dir. Herbert Ross, 1973). A mystery of bewildering complexity: one year after his wife Sheila was killed by a hit-and-run driver, a wealthy man (James Coburn) devises a game for six of his friends (Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett, James Mason, Ian McShane, Raquel Welch) to play as they travel the French Riviera on his yacht (named Sheila). Each friend is given a card with a secret, and the object of the game is to figure out whose secret is whose. Harmless enough, right? The screenplay, by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, is filled with delights and meta jokes about storytelling and moviemaking, but damn if I understand the plot. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Public Eye (dir. Howard Franklin, 1992). Joe Pesci stars as Leon Bernstein, The Great Bernzini, a photographer of New York City crime scenes and street life, loosely based on Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Barbara Hershey stars as Kay Levitz, a nightclub owner in difficulty with the mob who looks to Bernzini for help. The plot seems beside the point, everything here being a matter of atmosphere, with an extraordinary degree of attention to sets and furnishings. The only character who’s not merely a type is Bernzini himself, though he is of course a type of Weegee. ★★★ (CC)

*

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (dir. Carl Reiner, 1982). It’s a simple, deftly managed premise: scenes from black-and-white noirs mixed into the (also black-and-white) story of a private eye (Steve Martin) and his client (Rachel Ward). Thus we get what might be called cameo appearances by (in order) Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Edward Arnold, Kirk Douglas, Fred MacMurray, and James Cagney. It’s fun, but the novelty wears off, and the juxtapositions aren’t especially funny. I would like to have seen the intertextuality extend to the older movies themselves, with, say, Ray Milland talking to Lana Turner. ★★★ (F)

*

Female on the Beach (dir. Jodrph Pevney, 1955). A wildly melodramatic, campy delight. Joan Crawford plays Lynn Markham, a recently widowed woman who moves into her late husband’s beach house. She just wants to be alone (that’s how she likes her coffee: alone!), but odd neighbors Osbert and Queenie Sorenson (Cecil Kellaway and Natalie Schafer) and their protégé of sorts, Drummond Hall (Jeff Chandler) make that difficult. The relationship that develops between Lynn and Drummy is, at every turn, bizarre, and why Drummy is the way he is, why he cannot “change,” and how Osbert and Queenie so quickly find another protégé are questions left unexplored — and maybe I’m reading too much into the movie. ★★★★ (CC)

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All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Two doctors talking

From American Fiction (dir. Cord Jefferson, 2023), the Ellison brothers in conversation. Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), a plastic surgeon, says he’s keeping an eye on their mother. Thelonious, known as “Monk,” a novelist and professor, has something to say.

Cliff: “I’m a doctor.”

Monk: “So am I.”

Cliff: “Right. Maybe if we need to revive a sentence.”

As a member of an English department, Monk is the odd man out in his family of doctors and lawyers. I love this exchange, which reminds me that when I asked students to please not call me “Doctor,” I would quote Elaine: “A doctor is someone who can fix your knee.”

I have to take back what I wrote about The Holdovers: I think American Fiction might be the best new movie I see all year.