Movies

Coming up on TV: An Anti-war Masterpiece

by
James Coburn and James Garner in The Americanization of Emily

Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1964 The Americanization of Emily on April 7.    Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing English women for the brass.  Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War.  She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.

Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy.   Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it.  Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.

It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network.

Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe.

Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.

One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

Potiche: Funny French Farce

by

This delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine Deneuve (as if she needs one).   DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig both by choice and cluelessness.  He is also the meanest industrialist in France – Ebenezer Scrooge would be a softie next to this guy – and the workers in his factories are about to explode.  He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory.

Now, this is a familiar story line for gender comedy – why is it so damn funny?  It starts with the screenplay, which is smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore.  And the cast is filled with proven actors who play each comic situation with complete earnestness, no matter how absurd.

Director Francois Ozon, best known in the US for Swimming Pool and 8 Women, adapted the screenplay from a play and has a blast skewering late-70s gender roles and both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Gerard Depardieu plays the Communist mayor, who is both the husband’s nemesis and the wife’s former fling.   Two of the very best French comic players, Fabrice Luchini and Karen Viard, shine in co-starring roles as the husband and his secretary.

Coming Up on TV: A Great Sam Fuller War Film

by

On April 2, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1951 Korean War movie The Steel Helmet. It’s a gritty classic by the great writer-director Sam Fuller, a WWII combat vet who brooked no sentimentality about war.   Gene Evans, a favorite of the two Sams  (Fuller and Peckinpah), is especially good as the sergeant.

Certified Copy: Hmmmmmmmm

by

Abbas Kiarostami, the critically acclaimed Iranian-born director, presents us with a puzzle set in beautiful Tuscan hill towns.  An apparently unacquainted man and woman spend the day together.  Then they pretend that they are married.  And then they seem to have been long (and unhappily) married.

So after watching the film, one may ask if the couple was married and only pretending not to be at first?  Or did they instead start pretending to be married and just get more realistic toward the end of the film?  Or do different stages of the film depict different realities?  If you need to know what is going on in a movie and why, this is not a good choice for you.

The couple is played by the Juliette Binoche, and the British opera singer William Shimell.  They are excellent.  Binoche won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this role.

The Music Never Stopped: sentimental movies can be good, after all

by

Here’s a crowd pleasing movie.  Parents find their long lost adult son in a hospital, suffering from a brain tumor that has erased his much of his memory (and all of his short term memory).  A speech therapist discovers that the son’s personality is sparked by music that he remembers from his teens.  The father and the son have been estranged since the son left after an argument between them.  The father finds that he can reach over the memory disability and re-connect by learning the son’s music.

The son’s music is all from the period 1964 to 1970 – and this music is another character in the film.  Dad leaves behind his Big Band sensibilities to embrace Bob Dylan, Donovan, Steppenwolf, Crosby Stills & Nash and, especially the Grateful Dead.  Baby Boomers and Dead Heads will really enjoy this movie from the music alone.  Indeed, the Dead’s Bob Weir and Mickey Hart have been out supporting the movie.

The film is a showcase for the excellent actor J.K. Simmons, who plays the father.  Simmons is always very, very good (Juno‘s dad, getting fired in Up in the Air and on TV’s Oz and Law and Order).  Here, he plays a guy who is secure in his own righteousness, but then sees and accepts his own responsibility for the estrangement, and whose love for his son motivates him to make some big changes.  Lou Taylor Pucci is excellent as the son.  Julia Ormond does a good job playing the speech therapist.

Now I generally hate “disease of the week” movies.  Really hate them.  But here the real story is about the relationship between father and son, and the rebuilding of the bond between them.  The memory disability, along with their past and the father’s initial stubbornness,  is just another obstacle to their communication.

The story is based on an actual case described by Oliver Sacks in his essay The Last Hippie.

Coming Up on TV: Another Sam Fuller Trashterpiece

by

On March 23, Turner Classic Movies is airing Shock Corridor (1963).  Director Sam Fuller started out as a tabloid reporter and never missed a chance to shamelessly sensationalize a subject (except for war, which he insisted on treating realistically).  Shock Corridor is one of Fuller’s most sensationalistic films.

In Shock Corridor, Peter Breck plays a reporter who gets himself committed to an insane asylum so he can gather facts for an expose.  He meets an African-American patient who dons Klan garb and gives white supremacist speeches in the corridor.  He meets a fellow patient named Psycho who thinks he’s pregnant.  He is attacked by a horny mob of women in the nymphomaniac ward, which causes him to yell a truly great movie line, “Nymphos!”.  And then things don’t go so well for him after the electroshock therapy…

And, as you can see from the trailer, if Sam Fuller could get a stripper in his movie, he would find a way.

Coming up on TV: John Wayne as crooked football coach

by

On March 17, Turner Classic Movies is airing Trouble Along the Way (1953). John Wayne plays a gleefully corrupt football coach who buys players in an attempt to build up the football program overnight at a small Catholic school.  And he utters the famous coachspeak, “Winning isn’t everything – it’s the only thing.”  John Wayne wasn’t the first to utter that line – it was UCLA coach Red Sanders.  But the Duke said it nine years before Vince Lombardi did.

I discuss Trouble Along the Way and other football movies on my Best Sports Movies (scroll down for football).

Blogging from Cinequest: Potiche

by

This delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine Deneuve (as if she needs one).   DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig both by choice and cluelessness.  He is also the meanest industrialist in France – Ebenezer Scrooge would be a softie next to this guy – and the workers in his factories are about to explode.  He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory.

Now, this is a familiar story line for gender comedy – why is it so damn funny?  It starts with the screenplay, which is smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore.  And the cast is filled with proven actors who play each comic situation with complete earnestness, no matter how absurd.

Director Francois Ozon, best known in the US for Swimming Pool and 8 Women, adapted the screenplay from a play and has a blast skewering late-70s gender roles and both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Gerard Depardieu plays the Communist mayor, who is both the husband’s nemesis and the wife’s former fling.   Two of the very best French comic players, Fabrice Luchini and Karen Viard, shine in co-starring roles as the husband and his secretary.

Fortunately, Potiche will have an American releases on April 1.

Blogging from Cinequest: War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them

by

This documentary tells the remarkable Cold War spy story of Army Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski.  In his service on the Polish General Staff, Kuklinski saw that the Warsaw Pact’s war plans for an invasion of Western Europe would inevitably lead to the nuclear obliteration of Poland.  To avoid that horror, he passed on the Warsaw Pact war plans to the West so NATO could strengthen its stance and thereby deter the invasion by making it a less attractive option for the Soviets.

Kuklinshi passed over 40,000 pages of secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA – the largest act of espionage in world history.  After the screening, Director Dariusz Jabloński said that Kuklinski considered himself a Polish soldier doing his duty, not a spy for the West.

Kuklinski died just before he could be interviewed for this documentary.  However, Jabloński did secure interviews with the senior commanders of the Soviet and Polish militaries, former Polish heads of state, CIA officers and Kuklinski’s widow, as well as screen shots from Warsaw Pact war simulations.  At 110 minutes, it’s a little long, but the story is compelling.

The Adjustment Bureau: Avoiding the Curse of the Delayed Release

by

My hopes were not high for The Adjustment Bureau after the studio had delayed its release for several months.  That can be the telltale marker of a movie disaster.  But not this time – The Adjustment Bureau is a first rate love story embedded in the action thriller genre. A couple meet by chance and are drawn together – only to have scary guys in hats try to enforce different destinies for them.

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have excellent chemistry, and the screenplay by director George Nolfi is smart and inventive.  Nolfi also wrote the smart and inventive screenplay for The Bourne Ultimatum.  I’m certainly looking forward to his next project.

The supporting players – Terence Stamp, Anthony Mackie and John Slattery – are excellent.

Given the scarcity of them these days, it must be pretty hard to write a smart and authentic romance.  So all the more credit to Nolfi, and to Damon and Blunt for pulling it off.