Twelve movies

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

Larceny (dir. George Sherman, 1948). Before watching, I promised: no Dan Duryea imitations. Here he’s Silky (lol!), a criminal schemer who devises a con by means of which his better-looking compatriot Rick (John Payne) can scam demure war-widow Deb (Joan Caulfield) for all she’s got. Also on hand: Shelley Winters as Silky’s’s two-timing girlfriend Tory, and Percy Helton providing comic relief as the manager of a YMCA-style residence. A solid and, as far as I can tell, little-known noir. ★★★ (YT)

[I performed no imitations. But I can hear my inner Duryea now: “How ’bout it, baby? Did I keep my word?”]

*

The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023). The zone is the Interessengebeit, the area around Auschwitz reserved for SS use, where we meet camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their children, friends, and servants. The film depicts the Hösses’ daily life in a shiny modern house where Hedwig would like to live forever, separated from the camp by nothing more than a wall topped with barbed wire: thus the incongruity of idyllic scenes of gardening and children’s games as gunshots and screams fill the air and smoke rises from crematoria chimneys in the background. Call it the banality of evil, with a table of well-dressed men going over plans for a new kind of crematorium, and Höss as a mid-level white-collar worker explaining to his wife why the higher-ups want to transfer him. In its oblique narrative strategies and startling soundtrack, The Zone of Interest is an impressive film, and its depiction of the banality of evil speaks to our time in countless ways. ★★★★ (M)

*

Violence (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1947). Eddie Muller apologized for this movie when introducing it, and it’s not a distinguished effort. But its post-WWII story is eerily of our time: a difficult economy, a shortage of affordable housing, people who feel they’ve been left behind, and a populist demagogue, True Dawson (Emory Parnell), leader of the United Defenders, channeling the anger of veterans into mob violence while accruing money and power for himself. The noir comes in via Ann Mason (Nancy Coleman), a journalist with a Life-like magazine who infiltrates the Defenders while fending off the advances of organization higher-up Fred Stalk (Sheldon Leonard). When Ann awakens after a car crash and finds a faux-fiancé (Michael O’Shea) pumping her for information, will she remember who she is, or whom she’s pretending to be? ★★ (TCM)

*

A Place among the Dead (dir. Juliet Landau, 2020). A horror movie of sorts, directed by and starring the actor who played Drusilla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Juliet Landau is the daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, and the movie she’s made is an allegory in which her character hunts a serial killer/vampire who is a stand-in for the narcissistic mother and father (shown in family photographs) who have destroyed her spirit. Lots of Blair Witch Project atmosphere, with overwrought acting from Landau and brief comments on the nature of evil from Anne Rice, Joss Whedon, and others. Don’t believe the improbable string of ten-star write-ups at IMDb; this movie has an interesting premise but ends up a mess. ★ (T)

*

Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet, 2023). A strange death — a writer/husband lying in the snow, with a wound on the side of his head — is the ostensible mystery in this drama: did he fall from the top floor or balcony of the family’s chalet, or was he pushed? The movie becomes an anatomy of a marriage and a family, with two writers (Sandra Hüller, Samuel Theis), their son (Milo Machado-Graner), and recriminations and secrets galore. My strong misgiving about the movie is that the explanation of the husband’s death, if we’re meant to accept it, seems to stand independent of what would typically count as evidence: fingerprints? footprints? traces of blood in the chalet? a weapon? Best scene: the long argument. ★★★ (YT)

*

Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2023). Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) move from job to job, begin an inarticulate courtship, lose touch, and — somehow — manage to cross paths again and again. Strong overtones of Brief Encounter (there’s a poster for it outside the theater where they see The Dead Don’t Die) and Next Stop Wonderland, with copious vodka (Holappa has a problem), all kinds of karaoke, and a sweet dog named Chaplin. And throughout the story: radio updates on Russia’s war against Ukraine. Most poignant scene: Ansa buys a (second) fork, knife, and plate in preparation for her dinner date. ★★★★ (V)

*

Deep Waters (dir. Henry King, 1948). Life in a Maine fishing village, with all outdoor scenes shot on location. Dana Andrews is lobsterman Hod Stillwell; Jean Peters is social worker Ann Freeman, Hod’s former fiancée, now looking out for the welfare of Donny Mitchell (Dean Stockwell), an orphan whose father and uncle died at sea. You can probably see where the story is headed, and it’s a good story, warmhearted, unpretentious, perhaps even New England neorealist. With Ed Begley, Ann Revere, and Cesar Romero. ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature 1950: Peak Noir

Born to Kill (dir. Robert Wise, 1947). Lawrence Tierney is Sam Wild, a paranoid, murderous opportunist; Claire Trevor is Helen Brent, the heiress who finds him irresistible: “You’re strength, excitement, and depravity!” One of the loonier noirs, with Wild romancing both Brent and her foster sister Georgia (Audrey Long). all as Wild’s sidekick and domestic companion of five years, Marty Waterman (Elisha Cook Jr.), stands by his man. Esther Howard steals the movie as a fading alcoholic determined to do right by a dead friend. Marty gets the best line: “You can’t just go around killin’ people whenever the notion strikes you — it’s not feasible.” ★★★★

The House on Telegraph Hill (dir. Robert Wise, 1951). A Bergen-Belsen survivor (Valentina Cortese) takes a dead friend’s identity and steps into what promises to be a life of ease in San Francisco. Of course it’s anything but, because her marriage to her friend’s young son’s guardian (Richard Basehart) is complicated by the presence of a cold governess (Fay Baker) and a house full of danger and mystery. The movie is Gothic noir of a high order, with an air of dread hanging over even a game of catch. Best scene: the juice, with a nod to Hitchcock’s Suspicion. ★★★★

*

From MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series

Patrolling the Ether (dir. Paul Branford, 1944). Social media and its dangers, WWII-style. A man from the Radio Intelligence Division of the Federal Communications Commission (“an FBI of the airwaves”) asks a teenaged ham-radio operator to keep “cruising the spectrum” for anything suspicious. Together they trace a radio signal to a graveyard. The most interest thing about this short might be the convincing transformation from teenager to grown man via a fedora and pinstripes. ★★ (TCM)

*

A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Daniel Petrie, 1961) / A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Kenny Leon, 2008). Familial harmony and conflict, with a three-generation Black family, long-awaited money from a life-insurance payout, and the dream of leaving a South Side Chicago tenement for a house of one’s own. We watched these two adaptations of Lorraine Hansberry’s play on consecutive nights, and there’s no contest. The earlier adaptation has the principals from the Broadway production, with Claudia McNeil as Lena Younger (the matriarch) and Ruby Dee as Ruth Younger (daughter-in-law) far more persuasive than Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald. John Fiedler makes a far better representative of the white property-owners’ group than the ludicrously miscast John Stamos. And as Walter Lee Younger, Lena’s son, Sidney Poitier is a tightly wound, frustrated grown man; Sean Combs seems a laughably truculent youth by comparison. Two more points in favor of 1961: black-and-white cinematography, and a score by Laurence Rosenthal that evokes (at least for me) Porgy and Bess. Color cinematography and treacly music give the 2008 version at times the feel of a Hallmark movie. But I’d like to time-travel 2008’s Sanaa Lathan back into 1961: she brings a lively, caustic wit to the role of Beneatha Younger than Diana Sands seems to lack. ★★★★ (DVD) / ★★★ (TCM)

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Twelve movies

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

The Hunted (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1948). Four years ago, police detective Johnny Saxon (Preston Foster) arrested his girlfriend Laura Mead (Belita) for her role in a diamond heist; now she’s out of prison and telling Johnny she was innocent. But when Laura’s useless lawyer turns up dead, she’s the prime suspect. Though Foster and Belita (a British ice-skating star) are plausible as a couple joined in antagonism and attraction, they’re hardly strong enough actors to carry the movie. As in Suspense , Belita’s ice-skating is on display, though here it feels like an interruption rather than a part of the story. ★★ (TCM)

Johnny Eager (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1941). The corny title might have served as a warning: it’s an unpalatably preposterous story of Johnny Eager (Robert Taylor), a parolee who lives a double life, working as a humble taxi driver while running a gambling operation and a dog track. And get this: he falls in love with a sociology student (Lana Turner) whose father is the prosecutor who sent him to prison (awkward!). The reason to see this movie: Van Heflin’s performance as Jeff Hartnett, chain-smoking, chain-drinking, and unmistakably in love with Johnny. Best line: “My instinct was right: you couldn’t stop being a thief any more that a weasel could stop sucking chicken blood.” ★★★ (TCM)

[Van Heflin as Jeff Hartnett. Click for a larger view.]

*

Friends & Family Christmas (dir. Anne Wheeler, 2023). It’s a love story that presents the idea of the same–sex couple as utterly unremarkable, but the title is not as evasive as it might appear: the plot centers on Amelia, a corporate lawyer (Ali Liebert), and Dani, a photographer (Humberly González), two women who pretend to be dating to make their parents happy — thus friends, just friends, at least at first, and family, as the three parents (a lawyer dad, a math-prof dad, and a world-famous writer mom) are all on the scene in Brooklyn, rooting for the unbeknowst-to-them-fake relationship to flourish. Lots of artsy characters in the background, holding notebooks, wearing funny hats, talking about “travel grants for innovative thinkers,” and there’s even an Amanda Gorman look-alike poet who’s making a first attempt at fiction. Most awkward element in the story: the fathers’ creepily inordinate curiosity about their daughters’ romantic lives. Goofiest scene: dancing and paper lanterns, so thank you, Hallmark. ★★★ (H)

*

Guest in the House (dir. John Brahm, 1944). A superior psychodrama starring Anne Baxter as Evelyn Heath, a young woman coming to visit her fiancé’s family. Once embedded in the household, Evelyn begins to undermine familial harmony, pitting family member against family member, sowing doubt, fear, and jealousy everywhere. Baxter’s performance here is a clear precursor to her work in All About Eve. With Ralph Bellamy, Jerome Cowan, Margaret Hamilton, Aline MacMahon, and Ruth Warrick. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Secret Place (dir. Clive Donner, 1957). A suspenseful, deeply human story of a diamond heist gone wrong. At the center, the friendship of a solitary boy (Michael Brooke) and a beautiful newsstand attendant (Belinda Lee). Strong overtones of The Asphalt Jungle (plans and snags), Rififi (a nearly silent heist), and The Window (a boy in peril). The travels of the stolen diamonds add a comic element, and a chase through bombed-out London buildings makes for a highly satisfying ending. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Cover Up (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1949). Dennis O’Keefe as an insurance investigator coming to an insular town to investigate what the sheriff (William Bendix) insists was a suicide. Yet there was no gun at the scene, no shell casing either. This modest movie does a fine job of casting suspicion in many directions, with the who of the whodunit uncertain until the very end. With Barbara Britton, Doro Merande, and Christmastime. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Backfire (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1950). A superior noir, getting one more star than the last time I watched it. The seemingly unrelated pieces of the puzzle end up fitting together perfectly: Bob, a hospitalized vet (Gordon MacRae); Julia, the nurse who’s fallen in love with him (Virginia Mayo); Steve, an Army pal who goes missing (Edmond O’Brien); Ben, another Army pal who runs a mortuary (Dane Clark); and Lysa, a mysterious visitor to the hospital (Viveca Lindfors). The story unfolds in a series of flashbacks (compare The Killers) as Bob’s search for his missing pal comes to a wild conclusion. Daniele Amfitheatrof’s score is even wilder, often sounding like two scores played at once. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

No Time to Kill (dir. Tom Younger, 1959). The movie begins with Johnny Greco (John Ireland) breaking into an watchman-patrolled office building somewhere in Sweden and planting a device to make it appear that someone’s committed suicide, and then he hangs around in the building — huh? And the movie goes downhill from there. I expected a short late noir, and the movie was indeed short: IMDb says that thirty minutes were cut from the American release, so no wonder it’s incoherent. The single star acknowledges that this movie at some point was something better. ★ (YT)

*

Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chögyam Trunga Rinpoche (dir. Johanna Demetrakas, 2011). My intermittent curiosity about cult leaders and their followers led me to this documentary. What I found is a propaganda piece exalting Trungpa, a Buddhist teacher (1939–1987) with an extraordinary backstory (escape from Tibet), who drank, smoked, wore three-piece suits, sexually abused women and girls, founded the Naropa Institute, created his own pseudo-military guard, and died of cirrhosis. Here’s just one piece to read about Trungpa and his legacy. This loving tribute to Buddhism as fascism joins When We Were Bullies in getting no stars from me. (YT)

*

Maestro (dir. Bradley Cooper, 2023). I wondered if this portrait of Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) — and his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) would dwell only on Bernstein’s sex life. No — it’s about his personhood, in and out of his marriage and in the world of music, with Cooper and Mulligan giving great performances as partners in a difficult partnership. Extraordinary black-and-white and color cinematography by Matthew Libatique, and with the exceptions of Shirley Ellis’s “The Clapping Song,” R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and Tears for Fears’s “Shout,” all the music is written or conducted by Bernstein. ★★★★ (N)

[At home it’s best watched with subtitles, which will identify the music and clarify murky dialogue. I’m told the sound is better in theaters.]
*

The Barefoot Contessa (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954). In my movie-watching it goes with Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, and ‌Two Weeks in Another Town as a movie about the movies, with the story told by multiple narrators in lengthy flashbacks à la Citizen Kane (whose screenplay was by Mankiewicz’s father Herman and Orson Welles). The story is modeled on the life of Rita Hayworth: the producer Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) finds a potential star in the form of Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), a dancer in a Spanish tavern, and propels her to stardom in three features directed by the aging, fading director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), with tragedy to follow. My favorite line: “How much simpler it would be for so many of us if Kirk Edwards had not found it necessary to look for a new face.” My other favorite line: “And once more life louses up the script.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Brillo Box (3¢ off) (dir. Lisanne Skyler, 2016). Martin and Rita Skyler, the director’s parents, bought an Andy Warhol Brillo Box in 1969 for $1000 and — an inspired decision — had Warhol sign it (in crayon) as a mark of authenticity. As the box later made its way from the Skyler house to a series of other owners, its value went up and up — up to $3,050,500 at a 2010 auction. The family dynamics add interest here: Martin saw art as a means to money with which to buy more art; Rita saw art as art and would have held on to everything; it’s unsurprising that the two are no longer married. An odd fact: the Brillo box was designed by James Harvey, a commercial artist and Abstract Expressionist painter. ★★★★ (M)

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The Times investigates Hallmark and Lifetime movies

Stuff like this makes me want to just ditch my subscription and read for free through my university’s site license: “Just How Formulaic Are Hallmark and Lifetime Holiday Movies? We (Over)analyzed 424 of Them.”

One writer, seven people researching.

The short answer, per our household: pretty derivative.

[Our one Hallmark movie this year: Friends & Family Christmas. It’s a lesbian love story, with fake dating, painfully intrusive parents, a Brooklyn art lab, and “travel grants for innovative thinkers.” We watch one Hallmark movie a year.]

Evaluations

I drove my friend Aldo to the bus station and drove back to a large room filled with pews — not a church but a meeting room of some sort. I walked to the row in which I had been seated and found the evaluation packet for a newbie professor’s Intro to Film Studies class. The evaluation questions were meant for someone in the class: what percentage of the final grade was allotted to writing, what percentage to participation, and so on. Having no idea what to write, I just wrote OK in the margin next to each question. I also wrote the words retired prof somewhere on one of the pages.

A question about movies asked me to rate two: the Larry David movie Spite and a comedy about three nurses. I gave LD a 10, the other a 4. There were also questions about yogurt and juice, with samples. I skipped the yogurt but tried one juice, which was bland and mealy.

One of the authority figures presiding over the evaluations came and stood over me and asked why I was holding everyone else up. I replied that I had taken a friend to the bus station and was working as quickly as I could. I also pointed out that all the hectoring was just making my work take longer. I said “Yes, I took my friend to the bus station, and now I am planning a great train robbery. Just watch.” I started to write exactly that on my evaluation before realizing that doing so would identify the evaluation as mine. So I started erasing.

Possible waking-life sources: thinking of my friend Aldo Carrasco; watching some of Rosalynn Carter’s memorial service; watching a bit of Hanukkah on Rye, a Hallmark movie about rival delis that made me think of the spite store from Curb Your Enthusiasm; buying a variety of Greek yogurts; admiring a four-year-old’s erasing skills; giving out evaluation forms at the end of every semester but my last.

This is the twenty-seventh teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has gone wrong. But at least in this dream I got to see a friend.

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[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).]

Eleven movies, one season

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

The Wayward Bus (dir. Victor Vicas, 1957). From a 1947 novel by John Steinbeck. Imperfect strangers are changed in the course of a rugged journey by bus from the Salinas Valley to San Juan de la Cruz, Mexico. There’s the risk-taking driver (Rick Jason), his heavy-drinking wife back home at their café (Joan Collins), a dancer/stripper on her way to a job (Jayne Mansfield), a traveling salesman (Dan Dailey), a prim couple in a “sweet and clean” marriage and their fragile daughter (Larry Keating, Kathryn Givney, Dolores Michaels), a boy and girl from the café (Dee Pollock, Betty Lou Keim), and an old fellow (Will Wright) on his way to get married. Hard to say more without giving everything away. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Amateur (dir. Hal Hartley, 1994). Isabelle Huppert is an ex-nun in Manhattan, trying to earn a living writing pornographic stories. Elina Löwenshon is a porn star trying to break away from the business. Martin Donovan is a man with amnesia whose story makes all the parts fall into place. Stylish, suspenseful, grimly funny, and reminiscent, in all those ways, of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva. ★★★★ (CC)


[How dated a movie from the recent past can look: pay phones, video stores, indoor smoking, 3.5″ floppy disks, which, as someone points out, are neither floppy nor round.]

*

Chess Story (dir. Philipp Stölzl, 2021). An adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella with two major changes: the movie drops the frame story, in which a traveler recounts an ocean voyage, and it transforms the story within that story, of a Viennese notary who studies a chess book to keep his mind intact during imprisonment by the Nazis, into a narrative that blurs the line between reality and hallucination. Oliver Masucci, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Zweig, gives a brilliant performance as Dr. Josef Bartok (the novella’s Dr. B.), a man determined not to fall apart. No wonder the opening lines of the Odyssey run through his story. And apt words from Zweig’s address to the 1941 PEN Congress appear on screen at the movie’s end: “Es ist an uns heute, den Glauben an die Unbesiegbarkeit des Geistes trotz allem und allem unerschütterlich aufrechtzuerhalten” [It is for us today to maintain our belief in an unconquerable spirit]. ★★★★ (YT)

[Oliver Masucci as Dr. Josef Bartok.]

[It’s finally available to buy or stream.]

*

‌Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (dir. Lili Horvát, 2020). Natasa Stork is Vizy Márta, a Hungarian-born (last name first) neurosurgeon who leaves her practice in New Jersey for a romantic rendezvous in Budapest with a fellow practitioner Drexler János (Viktor Bodó) whom she met at a conference. But János has no idea who she is. Did lonely Márta even meet him, or is this attachment all in her head? Like Chess Story, this movie too blurs the line between reality and hallucination. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Superior (dir. Erin Vassilopoulos, 2021). Identical, wildly different twins: Marian (Alessandra Mesa), a singer in a band, and Vivian (Anamari Mesa), a tidy housewife. When Marian drops in for an unannounced extended visit (preparing, she says, for a recording session), the sisters find themselves trading places (as of course identical twins will) and coming up against grave danger. With 1980s decor and fashion, and nods to Kiss Me Deadly and Rear Window. A short prequel with the same title, also streaming, gives more context for the sisters’ early lives on the shores of Lake Superior. ★★★★ (CC)

[Vivian and Marian: two actors doing the one-actor-on-both-sides-of-a-doorway trope.]

*

Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz (dir. Barry Avrich, 2019). A documentary about the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, who died earlier this month. At the age of twenty-seven, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz took on that work and never stopped working for justice, later helping to bring about the creation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Ferencz’s insistence that crimes against humanity must never get a pass — the Nuremberg trials gave us the word genocide — has enormous resonance for our time. My one misgiving about this documentary: the epic-sounding music, which seems out of proportion to such a modest, unassuming man. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Third Secret (dir. Charles Crichton, 1964). A London psychologist appears to have killed himself, but his daughter Catherine Whitset (Pamela Franklin) insists that one of patients killed him, and she pleads with a television commentator, Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd) (himself a one-time patient), to investigate. Four patients are suspects: an art dealer, a judge, a lonely secretary, and Stedman himself. Muddy black-and-white landscapes, enigmatic passages from Hamlet and Lear chalked on a wall, and a spare score by Richard Arnell help establish an eerie atmosphere. The movie explores all three kinds of secrets. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Home Before Dark (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1958). I think this movie must be Jean Simmons’s finest performance. Simmons plays Charlotte Bronn, just released after a year’s stay in a state mental hospital and returning to a house (left to her by her father) inhabited by her ambitious, sex-averse philosophy professor husband (Dan O’Herlihy), her domineering stepmother (Mable Albertson), and her buxom stepsister (Rhonda Fleming). Another complication: a new philosophy prof (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) living as a boarder. With overtones of the Cinderella story and Gaslight, it’s a slow, brooding treatment of a woman going to pieces in a bleak New England winter. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Guilty (dir. John Reinhardt, 1947). From our household’s ideal year for movies, but this one’s a stinker, even if it’s from a Cornell Woolrich story. It’s a low-budget effort about murder, romantic rivalries, and identical twins (played by Bonita Granville), and it’s absolutely bewildering. For starters: which twin is which? Jack Wrather, the producer (and Granville’s husband) went to much better things with TV’s Lassie. ★ (YT)

*

Without Honor (dir. Irving Pichel, 1949). A superior B-movie, playing out in real time, almost all of it spent in a modest San Fernando Valley house — so someone must have been thinking about Aristotelian unities. And someone was likely thinking about Ibsen: witness the line “Things like this don’t happen.” Laraine Day is an adulterous housewife hiding a terrible secret in the laundry room; Bruce Bennett is her dim husband; Dane Clark is her sinister brother-in-law. A strange bonus: we get to see the delivery and unboxing of a tabletop television set. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Somebody Somewhere, first season (created by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, 2022–2023). Another Sunday night, and I think of this series as the antidote to Succession: funny and humane (and deserving of a much larger audience). Sam (Bridget Everett) returns to Manhattan, Kansas, to care for her dying sister, and ends up staying on. Her mother’s a hapless alcoholic; her father is just hapless; her sister is mired in a marital mess that suggests a Hallmark movie gone bad. Sam’s newfound family of choice in Manhattan is another story: a gay show-choir alum (Jeff Hiller), a trans soil scientist (Murray Hill), a Black veterinarian (Mercedes White), all members of the lively crowd that gathers for “choir practice” — covert nights of cabaret in a dying mall. ★★★★ (HBO)

*

Up the Down Staircase (dir. Robert Mulligan, 1967). I am always willing to watch this movie again again. This time I watched the school: the enormous classroom windows, the globe lights, the desks in rows, the teacher’s locked closet, the safety-fence staircases, the ugly auditorium — all reminiscent of my Brooklyn elementary school. And I watched the supporting players: Patrick Bedford (the sardonic Paul Barringer), Roy Poole (the non-nonsense J.J. McHabe), Eileen Heckart (the make-English-a-game Henrietta Pastorfield). And I watched Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis) take her wins where she finds them. ★★★★ (TCM)

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A little Hallmark nonsense

[Click for a larger view.]

This dialogue took shape as Elaine and I sat at the kitchen table holding cups of imaginary cocoa with both hands, Hallmark style. I took it upon myself to improvise some more in writing.

To the best of my knowledge, “skyldig till anklagelsen” is good Swedish for “guilty as charged.” Looking at previous posts about Hallmark movies, I now see to my astonishment one from 2020 that quotes “Guilty as charged!” as a line of cringe-worthy dialogue. Did that line lodge in my memory for later use?

I have no idea what this scene may portend. But I fear that He and She are about to stumble onto something like the Swedish original for Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” That’s not very Hallmark of me.

A few more Hallmark posts
“Double-extra whipped cream” : Hallmark hypercorrection : Hallmark and Prufrock : Hallmark rising : Hallmark trees : The Hallmark Zone : Instant Hallmark

Scalloped potatoes

“These movies are to Fox News what scalloped potatoes are to Pop Rocks soaked in Red Bull and PCP. A balm”: Virginia Heffernan writes in praise of Hallmark Christmas movies.

Twelve movies

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

The Big Night (dir. Joseph Losey, 1951). John Drew Barrymore as George La Main, a son who seeks to avenge his father’s humiliation at the hands of a sadistic sportswriter. The depiction of night people — an alcoholic professor (Philip Bourneuf), his mistress (Dorothy Comingore), her sister (Joan Lorring), a Billie Holiday-like singer (Mauri Leighton) — gives the film something of a noir element. George’s torment looks ahead to Jim Stark and Plato in Rebel Without a Cause. George, holding a revolver: “Think I’m a kid now?” ★★★★

*

Mike Wallace Is Here (dir. Avi Belkin, 2019). A documentary built with many great clips of Wallace as interviewer and interviewee, aggressive, skeptical, but also painfully honesty about his failures as a father and his struggles with depression (nothing though about the toxic environment for women at 60 Minutes). What I didn’t know before watching this film: Wallace was everywhere in 1950s television: as actor, pitchman, interviewer, and game-show host. You’ll have to watch to learn what changed him. The film would benefit from captions identifying interview participants, some of whom are far from recognizable; showing their faces with their names in the closing credits (and no other information) does little to enhance the viewer’s experience (Emile-Zola-Berman-who?). ★★★

*

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1967). “Her” is “the Paris region,” among other things, and the film offers an unromanticized image of the city and environs, nothing but highway construction and brutalist architecture. Scenes from the life of Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady), wife, mother, and part-time prostitute, recall Godard’s Vivre sa vie — as in that film a man in a café plays pinball as people chat. There’s a strong element of Wittgenstein in the narration and several conversations that evoke the idea of a language game. Those are three things I know about this film, which baffled and fascinated me. ★★★★

*

Edge of the City (dir. Martin Ritt, 1957). Strong overtones of On the Waterfront in this story of friendship and violence on the Manhattan docks. What’s distinctive about the film is its depiction of a friendship that crosses the color line, as longshoreman Tommy Tyler (Sidney Poitier) befriends new-hire Axel Nordmann (John Cassavetes). Tommy is a happy family man (with Ruby Dee making brief appearances as his wife); moody Axel harbors some terrible secrets. Supervisor Charlie Malick (Jack Warden) makes Axel’s life hell, with consequences both predictable and unexpected. ★★★★

*

Try and Get Me, aka The Sound of Fury (dir. Cy Endfield, 1950). “Unrelentingly grim,” said TCM’s Eddie Muller, as an unemployed husband and father (Frank Lovejoy) takes up work as a getaway driver for a preening and increasingly vicious criminal (Lloyd Bridges). But it’s not just a crime story: the film dwells at length on the role of journalists in stoking populist rage. Two highlights: Renzo Cesana as Dr. Vido Simone, a stiffly serious philosophical scientist, and Katherine Locke as Hazel Weatherwax, a desperately lonely manicurist. And one more: the final extended sequence, utterly gripping. ★★★★

*

Pain and Glory (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2019). A work not of strict autobiography but of self-revealing humanity, as Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a movie director in the twilight of his career, struggles with past success, present inertia, and chronic pain. Proustian moments of involuntary memory (beginning with a pianist in a restaurant) and two extraordinary coincidences lead to scenes of childhood and sexual awakening, to a meeting with an old lover, and to memories of Salvador’s adult relationship with his mother Jacinta (Penelope Cruz/Julieta Serrano). (It’s no coincidence that a file name beginning “Auster” appears on Salvador’s Mac: Paul Auster has much to say about chance and coincidence as legitimate devices in fiction.) The most moving scenes: the lovers’ reunion, and Salvador with his mother in her old age. ★★★★

*

Judy (dir. Rupert Goold, 2019). Judy Garland in 1968, booked for five weeks in London, with brief flashbacks to her life as a teenager in the studio system that did much to destroy her life. Not so much a movie as a sometimes thrilling, sometimes harrowing one-woman show, with Renée Zellweger channeling Garland’s fragile, tough presence with what seems to me eerie fidelity. As a singer, Zellweger is hardly Garland’s equal —but how could she be? The best moments: omelets, a cake, and a final performance. ★★★★

*

Bridget Jones’s Diary (dir. Sharon Maguire, 2001). We’d never seen it, so it seemed the appropriate follow-up to Judy. As Bridget Jones, Renée Zellweger is a charming, attractive mess of a human being. So why are the only men on her romantic horizon a pair of self-regarding twits, one without scruples (Hugh Grant), the other (Colin Firth) so emotionally constipated that he struggles to say “I like you”? As Elaine says, it’s a Bizarro World Hallmark movie, with cigarettes, vodka, sex, and strained overtones of Pride and Prejudice. ★★

*

The File on Thelma Jordon (dir. Robert Siodmark, 1949). YouTube comes through again, with a satisfyingly noirish film we’d never heard of. It gives little away to reveal that the story is a variation on an earlier Barbara Stanwyck film, with Stanwyck as Thelma Jordon, Wendell Corey as an assistant DA, and Paul Kelly as Corey’s boss. A little too much comedy, but also genuine suspense and mystery, particularly when old Aunt Vera wanders the house at night. My favorite line: “Maybe I like being picked up by a guy on a binge.” ★★★

*

He Ran All the Way (dir. John Berry, 1951). John Berry’s other films include Claudine and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan — marking him, surely, as a jack of many trades, at least. Here Nick Robey (John Garfield, in his last film appearance) and Peg Dobbs (Shelley Winters) make an awkward pair thrown together by circumstance and criminal desperation. Nice work by Wallace Ford as Peg’s father, Gladys George as Nick’s mother, and James Wong Howe as cinematographer, working in stark black and white. “Get a good car, baby, a nice car.” ★★★★

*

Two by Yasujiro Ozu

A Story of Floating Weeds (1934). This film, a silent, tells a story of betrayal, jealousy, and revenge among members of a traveling Kabuki troupe, as one player discovers the Master’s secret life, both past and present. The actors are understated, with the smallest gestures and changes in expression saying everything, and the cinematography is striking, with the camera stationary, and often at floor level, in what I now know is called a tatami shot, but which suggests to me the perspective of an audience sitting at the very edge of a stage. As the Gilgamesh poet says, there is no permanence: tobacco smoke drifts through the air, a lost wallet floats down a river, and players travel by train from town to town. A caution: “Don’t get mixed up with a traveling player like me.” ★★★★

Floating Weeds (1959). Which film to prefer and why: questions that must be the stuff of hundreds of film-studies assignments. The 1934 film has a concentrated intensity that’s missing from this more diffuse story, in which broad comedy with theater men and local women takes up too much screentime. Things improve when, with about an hour to go, the film begins to closely follow 1934. But the Master here seems hard-headed and self-righteous rather than agonized, and his mistress lacks the eerie blank expression we see in 1934. ★★★

[Madame Michel in Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog is devoted to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, so it seemed only right to see a couple after reading. ]

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Twelve movies

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

Claudine (dir. John Berry, 1974). Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones star as Claudine, a domestic worker and mother of six, and Roop, a charming garbage man. Their improbable first date blossoms into a relationship that seems destined to weather all challenges. The film was marketed as a comedy, but the mood shifts frequently, with considerable room made for social woes and commentary thereupon. Shark jump: one of the characters (not Roop) gets a vasectomy. ★★★

*

The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, 2001). Having reread all of J.D. Salinger, I wanted to see this film again to look for the Salinger overtones, which I vaguely remembered were supposed to be there. And they are: in the name Tenenbaum (the married name of Glass daughter Boo Boo is Tannenbaum), in the family of wunderkinder, in the sorrows at the heart of family life, in Margot’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) fur coat, cigarettes, and bathroom retreats (shades of Franny and Zooey). But these are surface elements. The Tenenbaums in other respects are wholly themselves, fragile, dysfunctional, and at home. ★★★★

*

Danger Zone (dir. William Berke, 1951). It appears on a DVD titled Forgotten Noir — forgotten for good reason. This B-movie stars Hugh Beaumont as a fellow who runs a charter-boat business but spends more time involved in capers. Capers, plural: the movie is made of two utterly separate stories, which sound to me as if they began life as episodes of a radio serial. Fun to hear Beaumont talk like someone from a Raymond Chandler novel, and fun to see Tom Neal (of Detour) as a hood, but this film is little more than a curiosity. ★

*

The Big Chase (dir. Arthur Hilton and Robert L. Lippert Jr., 1954). Also forgotten, and not even close to noir, with a veteran cop telling the story of a rookie who chases down a criminal gang (the gang includes Lon Chaney Jr., who doesn’t speak a single line). The chase, which takes up almost twenty minutes of this hour-long movie, involves cars, boats, a helicopter, and a second director, but it’s sadly lacking in suspense. The production values at times recall Ed Wood: watch the opening scene for instant confirmation, as the veteran cop offers a cigarette to a visitor, who declines, after which the cop removes two cigarettes from a pack, lets one roll off his desk, lights the other, which is unlit in subsequent shots, and then lights his cigarette a second time. One redeeming feature: many shots of plain, unglamorous Los Angeles, wide boulevards, auto repair shops, billboards, and fences. ★

*

Vivre sa vie (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1962). The story made me think of Zola — a woman’s slide from store clerk to prostitute. The intertitles, separating twelve short segments, made me think of silent films and Brecht’s epic theater: we know what will happen before it does (a meta kind of determinism). The café conversation about speech and writing made me think of Brassai (the camera angle) and Derrida. Seeing Anna Karina for the first time made me think of the other times I’ve come to someone’s work only after they’re gone. ★★★★

*

Jane Wants a Boyfriend (dir. William Sullivan, 2015).
Jane (Louisa Krause), who mends and tends to costumes for a theatrical company, is a young woman on the autism spectrum. Her sister Bianca (Eliza Dushku) is an actess with the same company. Alas, this film again and again places its focus on Bianca (and her journalist boyfriend, and her friends, and her role in A MIdsummer Night’s Dream, and her cranky director), when Jane and her misadventures and adventures in dating would be the appropriate focus. Perhaps the movie should have been called Jane’s Sister Wants Equal Time. ★★★

*

Small Town Christmas (dir. Maclain Nelson, 2018). We had to watch one Hallmark Christmas movie straight (and I do mean straight) through. Here, bestselling newbie writer Nell Phillips ends her book tour in the two-bit small town that inspired her novel, a town she’s never before visited, where she reconnects with handsome former co-worker Emmett Turner, whose stories of Christmas inspired her writing and who ghosted years ago when they both lived in the big city and were supposed to go on a date. Emmett now runs the town’s bookstore (named for his late sister, Paige Turner), and he has an explanation for why he ghosted, a good one. The best name here though belongs not to a character but to an actor: Preston Vanderslice, who plays the obligatory developer out to alter a town’s way of life. ★★

*

Wuthering Heights (dir. William Wyler, 1939). The 1958 television production prompted our household to read the novel, which in turn prompted us to watch this version. I think 1958 does a better job of suggesting (if only suggesting) the novel’s larger-than-life-and-death sado-masochistic torments. As Heathcliff and Catherine, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon are too restrained. But still, they’re Olivier and Oberon, and David Niven as Edgar Linton makes a perfect beta-male to Heathcliff’s alpha. ★★★★

*

Little Women (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2019). I came to this movie as a novice, recalling little more than Beth’s death in the 1994 version, so my judgment is unclouded by prior allegiance, unaided by prior knowledge. The acting is almost uniformly excellent, though Florence Pugh looks like a time traveler, ready to text the future at any moment. The decision to tell the story in a non-linear way baffles me, as it leaves the film, early on, with little momentum — just one vignette after another. My favorite scenes: the brief conversation about anger between Jo (Saoirse Ronan) and Marmee (Laura Dern), and the montage of Jo writing in the attic (even though her handwriting looks like something from the inspirational wall art sold at Wal-Mart). ★★★

*

The Public (dir. Emilio Estevez, 2018). Any movie about library life is a movie I’ll root for. This one has good intentions: Estevez plays a librarian who finds himself in deep sympathy with the homeless men who refuse to leave a Cincinnati library for a night outdoors in brutally low temperatures. Estevez and other cast members really look like library people. But too much is contrived or questionable here: the all-male occupying force, the absence of tobacco and substances, the near-absence of alcohol, a sub-plot with a city official’s family, and a bit of performance art that left me saying yeesh. ★★

*

Danger Signal (dir. Robert Florey, 1945). Faye Emerson is Hilda Fenchurch, a bespectacled public stenographer and typist, taking dictation and typing at the office, and then typing some more at home, where she lives with her mother. Zachary Scott is Ronnie Mason, a ne’er-do-well — or worse — writer who takes a room as a boarder in the Fenchurch house, where he ingratiates himself with Hilda, Hilda’s younger sister, and their mother. Strong echoes of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, but the film doesn’t fulfill its promise. What appears to be a significant plot device (a ring, as in Hitchcock) ends up forgotten, and the ending is too abrupt and improbable to satisfy. ★★★

*

Safety Last! (dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923). Here’a a genius at work. Harold Lloyd is “The Boy,” a young man looking to make good in a Los Angeles department-store. His brilliant scheme: have a friend climb the building, which will bring hundreds of people to the store. Endlessly inventive comedy, on the selling floor and up in the air, with many genuine thrills. ★★★★

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At the movies

Holden Caulfield is killing time at Radio City. The stage show has ended, and “the goddam picture” begins:


The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

The summary that follows — an amnesiac duke, a failing publisher, a meet-cute, a sudden bestseller, the return of an old fiancée, the end of amnesia, temporary complications, happy endings all around — sounds an awful lot like a Hallmark Christmas movie. It’s still 1951, in some ways, and people still hate-watch the goddam movies. They really do.

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Twelve movies

[Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

The Lost Moment (dir. Martin Gabel, 1947). Gothic noir, from Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. A scheming publisher (too-bland Robert Cummings) in search of a dead Shelley-like poet’s love letters wangles his way into a house of the poet’s 105-year-old beloved (Agnes Moorehead). A niece (Susan Hayward) provides romantic interest in the present. Eeriest moment: the hand on the arm of the chair. ★★★

*

Shadow on the Wall (dir. Pat Jackson, 1950). A satisfying thriller, in which a young girl (Gigi Perreau) is the key to solving a murder. Can a kind psychiatrist (Nancy Davis) unlock the child’s memory? Perreau and Davis are both excellent, as is Ann Sothern, cast in an unusual role. This noirish film is unusual in a more important respect: a girl and two women are front and center, with male characters entirely secondary. ★★★★

*

The Last Wave (dir. Peter Weir, 1977). A clash — or merger — of cultures, as a Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) defends a group of Aboriginal men accused of murder and begins to experience troubling visions. Everything here is suffused with dread: the most ordinary domestic interior seems to portend doom. And it’s doom on a grand scale: the vision of tidal apocalypse seems more timely now than ever. This film would pair well with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. ★★★★

*

The Face Behind the Mask (dir. Robert Florey, 1941). Chameleonic Peter Lorre: think of how much his appearance changes just in his earlier years, from the killer in M to Dr. Gogol in Mad Love to Mr. Moto to Joel Cairo to Ugarte. Here he plays Janos Szabo, an immigrant who turns to a life of crime after being horribly disfigured in a fire (thus the mask). Don Beddoe and Evelyn Keyes are strong in supporting roles. The plot is sometimes wobbly, but the bizarro ending almost makes up for it. ★★★

*

A Man Called Ove (dir. Hannes Holm, 2015). Ove is an elderly curmudgeon and recent widower whose attempts to end his life go wrong as the world around him intrudes. Everything in his story, told in a series of flashbacks, is predictable, as is the revelation that the curmudgeon has a softer side. But it’s all pleasant enough, in a better-than-Hallmark way. My favorite line: “Antingen dör vi — eller så lever vi” [Either we die — or we live]. ★★★

[I will add a sentence that has closed many New York Times articles: If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.]

*

Ida Lupino, Ida Lupino, Ida Lupino

Not Wanted (dir. Elmer Clifton and Ida Lupino, 1949). Between 1949 and 1953, Ida Lupino wrote and/or directed several socially conscious films. This one follows the plight of Sally Kelton. a young unmarried woman (Sally Forrest), pregnant after a brief encounter with sketchy pianist Steve Ryan (Leo Penn). Drew Baxter is the good guy (Keefe Brasselle) who’s crazy about Sally and finds her in a home for unwed mothers. The film reaches a resolution that had our household in tears. ★★★★

Never Fear (dir. Ida Lupino, 1950). Forrest and Brasselle as a dance team whose female member contracts polio. The film then moves from nightclubs to the Kabat-Kaiser Institute and intensive physical therapy. Making this film must have been deeply important to Lupino, who contracted polio in 1934. Two extraordinary dance sequences (one with Forrest and Brasselle, one with a group in wheelchairs), but the chemistry between the leads isn’t nearly as strong here as in Not Wanted. ★★★

[Remarkable: in neither film is there a question of how someone will pay for care. It’s just there, as health care should be.]

The Trouble with Angels (dir. Ida Lupino, 1966). Well, this film too is Ida Lupino. Rosalind Russell is the no-nonsense Mother Superior at a boarding school for girls; Hayley Mills and June Harding are the new arrivals who break the rules again and again. Good performances all around, though the pranks and punishments get a bit tiresome, and there’s very little of “school” to be seen. Is it a spoiler to say that I called the ending well in advance? ★★★

*

They Shall Not Grow Old (dir. Peter Jackson, 2018). The Great War from a British perspective: archival footage, restored and colored, with the recorded voices of veterans describing their experiences from enlistment to war’s end. The film gives the viewer not the story of a particular battle but the story of battle, in all particulars — what men wore, what they ate, how they trained, how they fought, how they died. If I were still teaching, I’d show this film alongside the Iliad. An extraordinary labor of love and respect. ★★★★

*

This Ain’t No Mouse Music! (dir. Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, 2014). The story of Chris Strachwitz, the German immigrant who fell in love with indigenous American musics and founded Arhoolie Records. The documentary tracks five of Strachwitz’s varied musical interests: blues, bluegrass, norteño, Cajun music, and New Orleans jazz. Strachwitz: “I was not conscious that this was any kind of cultural preservation; I just dove into this like a guy diving into a swimming pool, having a great adventure underwater or whatever, or going to paradise without having to suffer death.” My favorite moment: Ry Cooder talking about hearing, as a fourteen year-old, BIg Joe Williams’s “Sloppy Drunk Blues” (an Arhoolie recording) and realizing there was a lot in the world that he, Cooder, didn’t understand. ★★★★

*

Monrovia, Indiana (dir. Frederick Wiseman, 2018). This meandering portrait of a tiny rural town is certainly the most beautiful Wiseman documentary I’ve seen, full of bluer-than-blue skies and green corn, and minus what I call the Midwestern Sublime of dead fields and sheer emptiness. And because it’s a Wiseman film, without voiceover, without intertitles, much more is missing: any sense of the town’s economic well-being, its employment opportunities (I’d love to hear a young adult’s take), the meaning of what residents call “Homestead” (a subdivision? a subsidized-housing development?), the effect of the town’s proximity to Bloomington and Indianapolis, the town’s overwhelming support for Donald Trump in 2016, which can be inferred from the decals for sale in a street vendor’s display. The film’s purpose, as a blurb on the distributor’s website suggests, is to show big-city types just how good these people in the heartland are. Some scenes of life without irony — the basketball lecture, the Masonic ritual, the bench and hydrant debates — seem straight from a Christopher Guest film. ★★

*

Girlfriends (dir. Claudia Weill, 1978). A freelance photographer (Melanie Mayron) is trying to make it, as they said, and still say, in New York City. But it’s the 1970s, and it’s possible for a freelance photographer and her aspiring writer friend (Anita Skinner) to afford a two-bedroom apartment as they navigate young adulthood. The dialogue is sometimes stilted; the acting, sometimes wooden; but the movie is — somehow — an affecting picture of life in that time and place. Watch for Christopher Guest as a creepy boyfriend. ★★★

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Scandal in academia

From The Washington Post:

The Justice Department on Tuesday charged more than 30 wealthy people — including two television stars — with being part of a long-running scheme to bribe and cheat to get their kids into big-name colleges and universities. . . .

The criminal complaint paints an ugly picture of high-powered individuals committing crimes to get their children into selective schools. Among those charged are actresses Felicity Huffman, best known for her role on the television show Desperate Housewives, and Lori Loughlin, who appeared on Full House, according to court documents.

The final quoted sentence would benefit from a minor revision. The original:

Among those charged are actresses Felicity Huffman, best known for her role on the television show Desperate Housewives, and Lori Loughlin, who appeared on Full House, according to court documents.

Revised:

Among those charged, according to court documents, are actresses Felicity Huffman, best known for her role on the television show Desperate Housewives, and Lori Loughlin, who appeared on Full House.

See the difference? But better still, I’d say:

Among those charged, according to court documents, are the actress Felicity Huffman, best known for her role on the television show Desperate Housewives, and the actress Lori Loughlin, who appeared on Full House.

See the difference?

[Felicity Huffman but not William H. Macy? Meaning that he didn’t know about it? The affidavit says that “Huffman and her spouse made a purported charitable contribution of $15,000 . . . to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme.” Maybe Macy thought it really was a contribution? And good grief: Lori Loughlin now stars in Hallmark movies. Reading the affidavit, or at least as much of it as I could stand, made me feel sick to my stomach.]

Not just a white Christmas

The times are changing: Hallmark premieres four movies this holiday season with African-American male and female leads, the first such movies in Hallmark history. The movies themselves appear to be the same old same old: Christmas galas and festivals, a gingerbread contest, a historic-preservation battle, a return to a childhood home. But now with leads of color.

Two of these movies, Christmas Everlasting and A Majestic Christmas, air tonight. Memories of Christmas airs on Saturday the 8th; A Gingerbread Romance, on Sunday the 17th. Check, as they say, your local listings.

Imaginary movie

The Hallmark Zone. Troubled by the state of the world, a gentle scholar travels to a quaint town to watch the making of a holiday movie. Pressed into service for a cocoa-shop crowd scene, the scholar learns the true meaning of figurant, and discovers that his new reality is one that he cannot — and does not want to — escape.

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Merriam-Webster on figurant

Hallmark hypercorrection

I don’t know where my cable company gets descriptions for its programming. But I know that its description of the Hallmark movie My Christmas Love can be found here and there online:

A woman receives presents from an anonymous suitor who’s inspired by the “12 Days of Christmas,” and she tries to uncover whom the mysterious gift-giver is.

Who, not whom.

Just as whom is not to be confused with who, My Christmas Love is not to be confused with 12 Gifts of Christmas, a Hallmark movie in which an unemployed artist gets hired as personal shopper for an executive type. I know, twelve, right. But they are two entirely different movies.

[From the Garner’s Modern English Usage entry for hypercorrection: “Sometimes people strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately. The very motivations that result in this irony can play havoc with the language: a person will strive for a correct linguistic form but instead fall into error. Linguists call this phenomenon ‘hypercorrection’ — a common shortcoming.” And from the same entry, on using whom for who: “Perhaps writers should get points for trying, but those who don’t know how to use whom should abstain in questionable contexts.”]

NPR on Hallmark Movies

Today’s Weekend Edition Sunday has a segment on Hallmark Christmas movies. Linda Holmes and Lulu Garcia-Navarro are fans, even as they acknowledge that Hallmark’s unreality is utterly heteronormative and nearly all-white.

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Peppermint Hallmark

[Peanuts, November 22, 1970.]

Peppermint Patty (last name Reichardt I once heard) is watching a beauty contest. But I prefer to believe that she’s watching the Hallmark Channel.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard) : I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries : Hallmark ex machina : The Bridge, continued : Shine on, Hallmark Channel : Sleigh Bells Ring

[Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts. This strip ran again this past Sunday. Extra credit if you recognize the source for “(last name Reichardt I once heard).”]

Sleigh Bells Ring

“This has exceeded even my lofty expectations!” So says a character in the Hallmark movie Sleigh Bells Ring, on last night and on again six more times between now and the of the year. “My favorite of the season!!! Definitely a DVR keeper!!!” So says someone on Twitter. So bad it‘s good, says I. So bad and so good that having dropped in about halfway through, Elaine and I had to watch to the end. We had to see what would happen. Because after Alex overstepped by putting up all the Christmas decorations with his old girlfriend Laurel’s daughter Scarlett, how could things ever turn out right for him and Laurel?

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I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries : Hallmark ex machina : The Bridge, continued : Shine on, Hallmark Channel

Shine on, Hallmark Channel

Our fambly has found reliable entertainment in the local cable company’s plot summaries of Hallmark Channel movies, summaries at least as good as the movies themselves. Here’s one for Harvest Moon:

A rich girl loses her wealth when her family goes bankrupt, so she heads to a pumpkin farm they own and uses her ingenuity to create a line of pumpkin skin care.

Thoughts:

~ It’s a good thing that even in bankruptcy, the family owns a pumpkin farm.

~ But wait: should that be owned?

~ Between the time I photographed the description and wrote this post, Harvest Moon seems to have come and gone. The Hallmark Channel has already moved on to Christmas movies. And it’s not even Thanksgiving. Or even Halloween.

~ As Elaine reminds me, Illinois is The Great Pumpkin State. If this movie didn’t take place in Illinois, well, it should have.

~ Skin care for pumpkins probably takes a lot of ingenuity.

Related posts
I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries : Hallmark ex machina : The Bridge, continued

The Bridge , continued

A highlight of my December stint as a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries: The Bridge , or, rather, Karen Kingsbury’s “The Bridge.” At the gooey center of this TV-movie is a cozy, pseudo-magical bookstore/café (that would be The Bridge) whose owners (the old marrieds) are always helping their loyal customers (including the book-hungry students seen below). If Thomas Kinkade had run a bookstore, it would have looked like The Bridge.

As I watched, I wondered: how will they wrap up this story with only fifteen, ten, five minutes to go? They didn’t: the movie ended with the words To Be Continued — in December 2016. My faux outrage was real. Other viewers were genuinely upset. The Hallmark Channel issued an apology. And now comes the announcement that Karen Kingsbury’s “The Bridge Part 2” will air on March 20.


[Bookstore of light. All new!]

*

March 1, 2016: “Book-hungry students”? Now I’m not sure. They buy coffee, which they drink while they study, but I’m not sure they ever buy books. They do already own books, which serve as props for studying.

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Hallmark ex machina
I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries

[Beware any work of the imagination whose title includes the maker’s name. Other bridges: Hart Crane’s and Sonny Rollins’s.]