Domestic comedy

[With friends.]

“I said Caribbean.”

“I thought you said Peruvian.”

“I heard Yanny.”

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Domestic comedy

[While watching 90 Day Fiancé. It was very late.]

“It’s like Jerry Springer.”

“In houses.”

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Domestic comedy

“That beer at dinner wiped me for a loop.”

“Wiped?”

“Knocked me for a loop. It’s a good thing I have my insoles in so I can walk straight.”

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[The beer: Modelo Negra.]

Domestic comedy

“I thought you said ‘Help yourself.’”

“No, I said ‘Laurel.’”

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[If you’re lost: yanny or laurel.]

Domestic comedy

“There’s no getting away from branding. We’re all like race-car drivers.”

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[Context: Carhartt pants, Columbia fleece, New Balance sneakers.]

Domestic comedy

“And you asked him?”

“Yes.”

“And he deigned to reply?”

“Yes, he deigned.”

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A conversation from another world

From the Father Knows Best episode “Love and Learn” (April 11, 1960). Margaret Anderson (Jane Wyatt) is speaking to her college-freshman son Bud (Billy Gray):

“I had a conversation with the Dean of Men at the college today.”

“You did? Why?”

“Because he sent me a note.”

“Yeah? What about?”

“Your English grades.”

As the Anderson children grow up, the sexual politics of Father Knows Best become intolerable. But after watching all six seasons, I can say that in other respects Father Knows Best holds up surprisingly well. A 1950s domestic comedy with characters quoting Shakespeare and Whitman and talking about the Wordsworths, Dorothy and William? I’ll take it.

Other FKB posts
“Betty’s Graduation” : Flowers knows best : “Languages, economics, philosophy, the humanities” : “Margaret Disowns Her Family” : Scene-stealing card-file : “A Woman in the House” : “Your dinner jacket just arrived”

Domestic comedy

“It’s like Sex and the City , but without the sex and without the city.”

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[“It”: the television series Gidget, whose main character is also a narrator.]

Domestic comedy

[Reading the Nutrition Facts.]

“The Chessmen are twice as healthy as the Milanos.”

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Domestic comedy

[Singing.]

“In the bleak Midwestern. . . .”

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[Context here.]

Domestic comedy

[In a store. A security guard was headed in our direction.]

“I was afraid they thought you looked suspicious.”

“I thought I looked fetching.”

“Suspiciously fetching.”

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Twelve more movies

[No spoilers.]

The Bloody Brood (dir. Julian Roffman, 1959). Life and death among the beatniks, with bongos, poetry, and a Leopold and Loeb murder scheme. My favorite line: “I think you’re beginning to dig the scene.” Peter Falk’s second movie. A YouTube find.

*

For You I Die (dir. John Reinhardt, 1947). Life at Maggie Dillon’s Place, a roadside café with cabins. A convict forced to take part in an escape hides out there, leading to romance and other consequences. Comic relief from Mischa Auer as an actor/painter/taxi driver, and pathos from Roman Bohnen as a husband and father who went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never went back. But the café, I’d say, is the star. My favorite line: “Those travelin’ salesmen ain’t no steadier than the squirrels in the trees.” A YouTube find.

*

Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (dir. Maria Schrader, 2016). I saw this film in July in a theater and was happy to watch it again on DVD with friends. I was disappointed with the subtitles, different from the ones we saw in the theater, and sometimes nearly unreadable. And in a film that foregrounds matters of translation, with dialogue in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, a parenthetical indication that someone is praying, singing, or speaking “in a foreign language” is more than a little absurd. What, after all, is foreign? (The languages in question are Hebrew and Portuguese.)

*

The Loved One (dir. Tony Richardson, 1965). From Evelyn Waugh’s novel, a satire of the American way of death, with a screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood (I suspect it’s mostly by Southern). It’s a treat to see Jonathan Winters in a double role, and there’s a great turn by Liberace as a coffin salesman. Advertised as “the motion picture with something to offend everyone.” But this sort of épater la bourgeoisie hasn’t worn well. My favorite line, from Liberace, is about coffin fabrics: “Rayon chafes, you know.”

*

Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary (dir. John Scheinfeld, 2016). It’s a gift to see a handful of performance clips (some silent). It’s a gift to see home movies of Coltrane smoking a pipe, wearing his robe and slippers, playing with his children, joking around for the camera. But so much of this documentary (the documentary?) is devoted to adulatory blather. Bill Clinton, Wynton Marsalis, and Cornel West are the worst offenders. Example: “The totality of his consciousness expresses itself most fully on that record.” Thank goodness that Benny Golson, Jimmy Heath, and Sonny Rollins are also here to say something of value about their colleague and friend. And notice that Rollins more often that not speaks of Coltrane in the present tense.

*

After Hours (dir. Shepard Traube, 1961). “This is Swing Street, and this is my favorite spot, a little club called After Hours”: William B. Williams takes us to a jam session in this pilot for an unrealized television series. The rehearsed proceedings, starring Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, turn into genuine spontaneous excitement in “Just You, Just Me.” Exciting for me to hear Milt Hinton speaking, with the same sweet, foggy voice I heard when I met him in the late 1980s. At YouTube.

*

Jazz Dance (dir. Roger Tilton, 1954). A reminder that before jazz became an art of the soloist, its was an ensemble music made for dancers. In that spirit Jimmy McPartland leads a band at New York’s Central Plaza Dance Hall — Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Archey, and Willie “The Lion” Smith are among the players on hand. A raucous, even frenzied twenty minutes of music and movement. If Weegee were to have made a film at a jazz dance, I think it would look much like this one. At YouTube.

[Leon James and Albert Minns, who appear in After Hours as a doorman and waiter given to dancing, appear in this film as what they were: dancers.]

*

Freaks and Geeks (created by Paul Feig, 1999–2000). I know that an eighteen-episode television season isn’t a movie, but still, it should count for something. This series is the best thing I’ve ever seen about high school. The intimidation, the insults, the doomed efforts to be cool, the exile to right field: it’s all here. The line that resonated most strongly for me: “What’s the point?” Why, peers, do you have to be so inane? A clear influence on Stranger Things, I now realize.

*

Forgotten (dir. Nadia Beddini, 2016). Life among the homeless people of Los Angeles, at Venice Beach, in Hollywood, and on downtown’s Skid Row. What’s most striking is the variety of people who meet the camera: a lawyer (or so he says), as a former college student, a young mother, an electrician, another electrician. Domestic turmoil, substances, and mental illness loom large in their stories. Worst moment: a woman who describes giving birth “in the open” — in other words, on the street.

*

Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2017). I admired Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha and 20th Century Women, and I expected to like Lady Bird. I wanted to like it. But as with La La Land, I’m bewildered by the praise given this movie. It’s based on Gerwig’s life as an high-school student in Sacramento, with Saoirse Ronan as Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, at odds with her family, at odds even with her name: “People go by the names their parents give them, but they don’t believe in God.” While there are a few moments of genuine comedy and emotion and social criticism, too many plot devices come from the world of a trite sit-com, and the characters remain inert. Give me Freaks and Geeks or, for a better comparison, Ghost World.

*

Voyeur (dir. Myles Kane and Josh Koury, 2017). The story of Gerald Foos, a motel owner who peeped on his guests, taking extensive notes and masturbating, and Gay Talese, the writer who met Foos, peeped with him, and, years later, revealed the man’s secret life in the New Yorker. I like the Gay Talese who in a previous century wrote for The New York Times about odds and ends of New York life. I don’t like the Talese of this movie, egomaniacal, manipulative, and shamelessly self-serving — much like Foos. (And like Foos, Talese works in a private space: a basement, not an attic.) Most appalling scene, for me: Talese, who has called Foos a nut, writes an e-mail telling him to “hang in there, as athletes and pioneers must.” Runner-up scene: Talese pitching the story to a New Yorker editor.

*

Shockproof (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1949). “Corrosion.” “What?” “That’s what’ll happen to us.” Love and criminality, as a parole officer and a parolee (Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight, real-life marrieds) flee the authorities and move toward an improbable end. There’s more than a touch of They Live by Night (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1948) in the story. With Esther Minciotti (Mrs. Piletti from Marty), Arthur Space (Doc Weaver from Lassie), and Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building.

What have you seen that’s worth recommending?

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Domestic comedy

“The brain cells are having a big party outside our heads. They’re handing out candy canes and iceskating.”

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[Too much Hallmark.]

Domestic comedy

[Watching an episode of Freaks and Geeks.]

“I’m so glad our kids are not in high school anymore.”

“I’m so glad I’m not in high school anymore.”

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Domestic comedy

“A Thanksgiving movie now? When it’s already almost Christmas?!”

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Domestic comedy

“We’ve never been to the new McDonald’s — which is now old McDonald’s.”

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Domestic comedy

[After using the remote control.]

“There, that’s better. Now he’s using his inside voice.”

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[“Inside voice” comes from American Splendor (dir. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003): “Remember what I told you about loud talking? Use your inside voice.”]

Domestic comedy

“It’s gotten to the point where he’s finally lost all of his lack of respect for me.”

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Twelve more movies

[No spoilers.]

The Salesman (dir. Asghar Farhadi, 2016). From the director of A Separation (2011), the movie that made me want to see this one. When an apartment building is shaken to its foundations and rendered uninhabitable, two of its tenants, a husband and wife in “the arts” (theater), move to a new building, where their marriage is shaken to its foundations by an assault and its aftermath: the victim’s self-doubt and shame, her partner’s need for revenge. All against a backdrop of Death of a Salesman, whose relevance isn’t always especially clear. A DVD-extra interview with the director helps.

*

Columbus (dir. Kogonada, 2017). In Columbus, Indiana, a town filled with modernist architecture, Jin (John Cho), the son of an dying architectural historian, and Cassandra, or Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young local, meet and talk and walk and look at buildings, again and again. Their relationship (which begins as they stand on opposite sides of a fence) cuts across barriers of age, culture, and class. The leads are excellent: Cho as a son who professes no interest in architecture and resents the gestures of mourning that will be required of him; Richardson as a young woman obsessed with architecture who sees no way to escape her obligations to her mother and get away to college. The film was too perfect, too pretty for me, with virtually every shot displaying symmetry or pleasing asymmetry. And yes, Jin and Cassandra talk about symmetry and asymmetry. But unlike Elaine, I was able to refrain from checking the time while watching. Columbus has had rave reviews, so consider these sentences a minority report.

*

Más Pedro Almodóvar

What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984). Domestic comedy and tragedy, with three dysfunctional generations in a tiny apartment: a grandmother who keeps her mineral water under lock and key, her cabdriver/forger son Antonio, his amphetamine-addled cleaning-lady wife Gloria, a drug-dealing elder son, and a younger son who’s prostituting himself to men. And Gloria’s next-door best friend Cristal, also a prostitute. This movie felt to me like preparation for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988).

Broken Embraces (2009). A brilliant, richly plotted story of fathers and sons; love, loss, and revenge; and movie-making, informed by the spirits of Audrey Hepburn, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo), and Michael Powell (Peeping Tom). With Penélope Cruz and other Almodóvar regulars. Prerequisite: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I now have three favorite Alomdóvar films: All About My Mother, Volver, and this one.

*

Good Morning, Miss Dove (dir. Henry Koster, 1955). Something like a schoolroom version of It’s a Wonderful Life, with Jennifer Jones as an elementary-school geography teacher, strict, severe, devoted to duty, and somehow loved by her students and townspeople. In the one extended scene of Miss Dove (no first name) at work in her panopticon, she interrupts the “lesson” again and again, stopping to address every transgressor of the rules. What’s really being taught here? Not just the products of the Argentine pampas. I was made to read Frances Gray Patton’s story “The Terrible Miss Dove” in middle school. What was that about?

*

L’Argent (dir. Robert Bresson, 1983). “O money, god incarnate, what wouldn’t we do for you?” Bresson’s last movie, all tans and blues, with money as a means not of exchange but of betrayal. A young man passes a counterfeit bill, and that one act proves to have disastrous consequences in other lives, far removed. Bresson works with extraordinary economy, letting the viewer fill in the implications. From a Tolstoy novella, The Forged Coupon.

*

Deux films avec Isabelle Huppert

Things to Come (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016). Huppert as a philosophy teacher who finds her life — no spoilers — upended. And then — no spoilers — life goes on. I loved this film, which makes intellectual work feel as everyday as any other kind of work. How could I not love a film that begins with a protagonist grading papers while on a family outing? For advanced grown-ups only.

Elle (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 2016). Huppert as the owner of a video-game company, a woman whose life is saturated in violence, sex, and sexual violence. This film is by turns intensely disturbing and strangely funny. It’s like a comedy of musical beds interrupted by scenes of stylized terror, or a whodunit interrupted by scenes of domestic farce. Excellent, but Things to Come is the film I’d choose to see again.

*

Ministry of Fear (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944). Had we seen it before? Yes? No? Maybe? Yes, I think, years ago. Ray Milland plays a man who stops by a village fête and walks away with a cake that was meant for someone else. Trouble follows. An excellent noirish thriller, with a séance, spies, a great scene on a train, and strong overtones of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. This film makes conspicuous use of doors — one after another, each opening onto new trouble. My favorite moments: the man crumbling cake, Martha Penteel’s doorbell, light shining through a bullet hole.

*

The Outrageous Sophie Tucker (dir. William Gazecki, 2014). Sometimes a movie appears to rise of its own accord to the top of the Netflix queue. I became idly curious about Sophie Tucker after seeing her in
an Ed Sullivan clip that evoked a lost world of stage performance. But Tucker, singer, entertainer, the Last of the Red Hot Mamas, was made, really, for these times. She was frankly sexual and frankly fat, a pioneer of commercial endorsements (in English and Yiddish), and an early social networker, collecting names and addresses in her travels and sending out cards when she was about to play a city. This documentary has too little Tucker, too many talking heads, and several awkward moments of digital trickery to put old photographs into motion. (Why?) Fortunately, YouTube is full of Tucker herself.

*

Ninotchka (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1939). “Garbo laughs,” as the movie poster promises. Ninotchka, Nina Ivanovna Yakushova (Greta Garbo), grim, prim Soviet envoy, comes to Paris to check on the doings of three comrades who have been sent to reclaim jewels from a Russian duchess. Ninotchka proceeds to fall in love with a Parisian count (Melvyn Douglas). The famous Lubitsch touch might now seem like the stuff of a hundred rom-coms since. But those pictures don’t have screenplays by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder (and Walter Reisch). “You’re the most improbable creature I’ve ever met in my life, Ninotchka . . . Ninotchka.” “You repeat yourself.” And when Ninotchka asks for raw beets and carrots: “Madame, this is a restaurant, not a meadow.”

*

Frantz (dir. François Ozon 2016). The vaguely Zweig-like premise made me curious about this film: a young woman who has lost her fiancé in the Great War sees an unknown young man leaving flowers at her fiancé’s grave. There's nothing more I can say about the story without giving something away. I can say that Frantz is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (1932), an atypical Lubitsch film (which I first learned of from a DVD-extra interview with Ozon). Frantz is a delight to the eye, filmed in rich black and white with occasional elements of color. Paula Beer and Pierre Niney offer understated, deeply moving performances. If I were running the Academy Awards I'd have chosen Frantz (not The Salesman) as the best foreign-language film of 2016.

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Domestic comedy

[Talking about roads not taken.]

“That program? It would have been like galley slaves, but with grading instead of oars.”

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[I finally got it right, or wrong: I thought I’d said “freshman papers” and “oars,” or “grading” and “rowing.” But no, it was “grading” and “oars,” not parallel, I know.]