The Trial (1962)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Hey, some of them have slipped under the radar, and when it comes to a director like Welles, the further on you get in the filmography, the less the DVD/Blu Ray releases are shown love, and the less we may be getting out of the film all together.

Did I Like It: Welles once called it his best movie. We can debate as to whether or not he really believed that, or if he was making the proclamation defensively, whether because of the muted response the film received originally, or whether he was so desperate to move public opinion away from Citizen Kane (1941). 

I think he had to be defensive about it all. To be certain, all of the scenes have that trademark Welles vitality that is only truly noticeable when the contrasting authors of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) are experienced. Camera angles are arch, people talk over people (unheard of, even this late in Welles career) and everything moves with a vitality that proves once again Welles was never content to just let a scene play out in the manner in which any other, ordinary and mortal director would be content.

Here’s the thing, though. The “pinscreen” opening might have had some unusual quality in the time it was released, but here it feels like a powerpoint presentation masquerading as cinema. I grant that might be more about the time in which I am writing this review than the reality of the quality of the film itself, but I can’t write these words in another time. The beginning becomes a further albatross because it suggests that the entire film is meant to be a dream. I’m not sure if that actually is Welles’ intent or not, but it would certainly explain the films more impressionistic impulses, but then we are left with a question that is unavoidable:

How long can a film sustain itself if it is all meant to be a dream? Do we dream sustained for two hours? Does my current era lack the attention span to allow for a dream that goes on that long? The film certainly has more interest in questions than answers, but if I’m spending the entire time asking the wrong questions, am I the problem, or is it the film?

Macbeth (1948)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles, Jeanette Nolan, Dan O’Herlihy, Roddy McDowall

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know. I’m a fraud. Do I turn my credentials into you or is there some kind of central office to which I need to mail it.

Did I Like It: I mean, right out of the gate, I’m thinking… Gee, he even managed to give the witches Scottish accents. As the film proceeds, nearly every character (maybe not so much Dan O’Herlihy’s Macduff, but you can’t win them all). You don’t see that in every filmed adaptation of the Scottish play. Hell, at times it feels like the Scottish accent is the single most misappropriated in the history of the motion picture, but then again, that might be mostly tied to Sean Connery and his vague insistence to never play a Scotsman, but instead play every other nationality on the Earth as if they were Scottish.

Here in this film, the big budgets of the studios had departed, and were never to quite return (with the possible exception of Touch of Evil (1958), but this is where the least spoken about parts of Welles’ genius (and he was a genius, despite what the vagaries of Hollywood might have tried to do to it) comes into full, undeniable bloom. 

Even when the money had run out, and the eyes of power not only ignored Welles but were content (and not entirely incorrect) in their assessment that they had destroyed him, he was still committed to making a film that always engages, and often surprises. Welles is—from the film’s first few moments—reaching for something a bit better than the average, and in ways that people would have never noticed/forgiven him. This is a b-movie in the resources brought to bear, but that doesn’t mean it has to accept its lowly status. It will always reach to be one for the ages. Failure is acceptable (it does not fail), but it would be in accepting limitations that things become irretrievably lost.

One note? While Mercury stalwart Jeanette Nolan equates herself well as Lady Macbeth, I can’t help but wonder if Welles had only met Eartha Kitt earlier. Had she played the character, the film just might have been as memorable (if not necessarily better) than Citizen Kane (1941).

The Wolf Man (1941)

Director: George Waggner

Cast: Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi, Warren William

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Although my strongest memories of the film probably come from a Universal Monsters coloring book I got in the early 90s. I had some really great times with that coloring book. Now I wish I had just gone over it in grey and black and hadn’t used any of the other colors…

Did I Like It: Interesting that Chaney is perhaps the saddest-sack movie star who ever lived (imagine if he had ever played Willy Loman), and somehow Forrest Gump-ed his way into being the Nick Fury of the Universal Monsters, that first shared cinematic universe. 

He’s certainly affecting in that capacity, and managed to do so over the course of five films in the roll, the longest sustained run in the Universal canon, and it still feels like the horror series is a something of a priority for the studio, even if James Whale has since retired from the motion pictures and the peak of the series is now firmly in the past. Yes, the entire affair has a bit of a feel of a TV special (see the opening titles), but the photography is interesting, and the ending where Sir John (Rains) unknowingly killed his son is deeply and tragic, and the film certainly reaches for a “less is more” aesthetic with its werewolf transformation.

And yet, by about minute 56 in the film, I’m bored. That’s not a great sign, considering that the film will be over in just over 10 more minutes. Chaney’s pathos cannot hope to hold up in comparison to that of Karloff, and the atmosphere is largely perfunctory, which leave it in the shadow of even Dracula (1931), which is saying quite a bit.

Coco (2017)

Director: Lee Unkrich

Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I can’t even claim that COVID has thrown my more recent movie consumption out of whack. This one came from the before times, and I’ve had a Disney+ subscription since halfway through the first season of The Mandalorian. I’m behind on all things Pixar and it’s making me feel weird.

Did I Like It: There’s more than enough written about Pixar’s unique ability to make people cry within the first few minutes of a movie. I don’t want to talk about that, mainly because its been talked about death, but really mainly because I’m a robot and my creators forgot to build me with the ability to have my emotions seep out of my eyes*.

What I do want to talk about is the unique ability of Pixar movies to confound expectations in their storytelling. At about the five-minute mark in this film—just at the crest of Lora’s first set of tears—I felt like I was going to be done with the film. Ernesto de la Cruz (Bratt) is Miguel’s (Gonzalez) great-great-grandfather and the one excised from the family history. I’m one of those people that write the rest of the film far too quickly, and the Pixar folks see me coming a mile away every time. There’s a perfectly acceptable kids movie filled with Day of the Dead imagery and filled with Latin music about embracing your true destiny and bring music back to your begrudging family. This movie is ready to go straight for the throat and expose the pulsating jugular and try to say something about how long and anger can be so interchangeable as to practically be quantum states.

*Which wouldn’t be a terribly pitch for a new Pixar movie, while we’re on the topic…

Easy A (2010)

Director: Will Gluck

Cast: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: She might just be a little bit beyond it now—especially as she’s already done her near-obligatory superhero film tour of duty with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)—but Emma Stone would have made a great Barbara Gordon. Ah, well. Given the once and future Batgirl’s struggles to find her way to the big screen, it was never meant to be. I promised myself this review would devote fewer than 100 words to Barbara Gordon, and I am in imminent danger of breaking that limit.

That is all to say that had this film only had Stone’s up-until-that-point-undiscovered star power to fuel it. More than enough teen movies and romantic comedies are content to hinge their success or failure on chemistry or star power, and plenty of them get the job done well enough. Thankfully, there’s a big vibe of being delightfully smarter than everyone else in the room* throughout the film. Even reaching for such a quality immediately puts this film ahead of the average film in either genre. Far more valuably, though to the quest of being a memorable comedy, is an insistent vein of absurdism throughout. Some might claim the non sequitur is a weaker form of humor, but those people are wrong, and even they are going to enjoy the film. That’s the real strength: there’s something here for everyone, and no one has to feel like they’re slumming it. 

*In case you were wondering, that’s where the big Barbara Gordon energy comes into the proceedings for me. It should for you, too. I *really* shouldn’t have dived right into the writing of this review right after reading a lot of Batgirl movie news.

You’ve Got Mail (1998)

Director: Nora Ephron

Cast: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Parker Posey, Greg Kinnear

Have I Seen it Before: Many, many times. Greg Kinnear’s character might have seeped into my brain a little bit.

Did I Like It: Remember when this movie was released and it seemed like it was a love story for the foreseeable future? Dial up connections, America On-Line, and the impenetrable power of the large bookstore chain.

Now, it’s possibly even more quaint than its ancestors The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and In the Good Old Summertime (1949). A subsequent, more current remake of the film would only work as a horror movie. Which now that I think about it, I need to go make a note in another document… The Greg Kinnear character can still use AOL if it makes everyone feel a sense of unearned of comfort.

On that note, I’m struggling to think of a film more designed to—and succeeds to—comfort from moment to moment. Hanks and Ryan—the end result of a long-dormant government experiment to create beings of pure likability—are at the top of their collective game*, and that’s in a film where demonstrably, Hanks is playing the villain. Imagining a world where everyone from the corporate fat cat to the plucky underdog is fueled entirely by being good with a turn of phrase when they’re not eye-ball deep in a book is more romance than anyone ought to get from a single movie.

And sure, the triumph of true love against odds in a world of increasingly impersonalized communications has its charms, but that ain’t what keeps me coming back to the movie.

*Yep, I’m putting this one ahead of When Harry Met Sally (1989) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). Come and fight me about Nora Ephron films, if you feel the need.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones

Have I Seen it Before: Yup.

Did I Like It: So, lately I’ve been listening to many of the later (read: preposterously impossible to be adapted to film) Tom Clancy novels via audio book and before we get into this film, I think now is as good a time as any to get some things off my chest. Never have I ever been through such a more progressively ridiculous set of events in my life, and I include both the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Trump presidency in that statement. Why have I subjected myself to these interminable tomes? Well, I had purchased Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears (read, those Clancy books which were begrudgingly—by all parties—adapted to film) on Audible and with my reading goal for 2021 well passed, I could take some chances on some books I only bought on an ill-defined impulse. By the time I was in the middle of Fears—which at least partially hinges on a subplot involving Ryan’s bout of erectile dysfunction*--I was “Jim-ing” an unseen camera so often, that John Krasinski’s eventual casting finally made sense. I kept going because the knowledge that Ryan’s supreme intelligence and only-honest-man-in-town-ness propels him into the Presidency… for reasons. It’s time I’ll never get back, and by the time of Executive Orders when Ryan addresses the nation and applauds his fellow citizens for making responsible decisions for themselves in the efforts to stem an outbreak of airborne Ebola, I laughed so hard at my car’s stereo, I fear I may have hurt my Honda Civic’s feelings.

Tom Clancy is garbage. He continues to be garbage, and he’s been dead for nearly ten years.

But, here’s the good news! None of the later—and even occasionally posthumous—absurdities of the saga of John Patrick Ryan are here. This is a brilliantly constructed spy thriller, where Jack Ryan (Baldwin – could you imagine him, or for that matter Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, or Krasinski portraying Clancy’s latter-day Reaganesque fever dream of a President?) is the perpetually under-estimated smartest man in the room… or boat.

While I might say that the story ultimately halts more than it concludes, the trip to that anti-climax is engaging enough, and all of the people involved aren’t bringing to the proceedings the same baggage as the source material** that it’s extraordinarily difficult not to like the film, despite my steadily increasing antipathy for the character.

*Clancy sure knew his audience. I’ve got to give him that.

**To be fair, part of the film’s strength is that the direct source material is far and away Clancy’s strongest book. It came before he started to buy his own press.

Me and Orson Welles (2008)

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Claire Danes, Ben Chaplin

Have I Seen it Before: I mean, yeah…

Did I Like It: There are any number of films—both narrative and documentary—about the making of Citizen Kane (1941), the War of the Worlds broadcast, and Orson Welles’ long slow slalom through increasing cultural ambivalence. I’ve watched pretty much all of them, so it is nice to spend a little time with the man before he is a household name. Focusing in on the rehearsals and performance of his famed fascist Julius Caesar ensures that there will likely never be another film treading over the same material. The film’s attempts to recreate that singular production bring us as close to witnessing that event as we possibly can. Linklater fills the film with a vital energy, where a lesser director might have let the material and setting speak for itself.

Except, the film isn’t really about him. Which is fine, as McKay gets the voice and cadence of Welles right, but as with so many who have tried to play him in the years leading up to the making of Kane, he’s already far too old to play Welles. He apparently has played the role occasionally in stage productions, and he might very well be the best possible performer for Welles post-The Stranger (1946) and pre-Touch of Evil (1958). It also helps that Efron makes a level-headed play for material beyond the teeny-bopper fare that brought him initial fame. He brings a refreshing earnestness to the stock character type of the wide-eyed boy who  wants to be a big star. It truly is an engaging depiction of life in the theater, and infuses the notion with just enough realistic romance that even I can feel a bit wistful for not having pursed such a life. His chemistry during a flirtation which never quite blooms into a romance with Clare Danes left me not once dwelling on their staggering age difference… until sitting down to type this review.

A Night at the Opera (1935)

Director: Sam Wood

Cast: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Kitty Carlisle

Have I Seen it Before: For the kid who watched more Turner Classic Movies than MTV in the `90s, it would have been hard to miss.

Did I Like It: I’ve often mentioned that, while enjoyable, the larger majority of the Marx Brothers films fall into that trap that a lot of early sound films fell into, where they are so irretrievably locked into the massive new equipment needed to record the sound* that all they can really do is recorded stage performances. Their movies so often stop entirely for musical numbers that aren’t so much a part of the story trying to be woven, but more akin to a follies revue, which can drag down the proceedings at times**.

This limitations probably works in the Brothers’ favor. Chico and Groucho are simmering cauldrons of snappy dialogue, so much so that if you aren’t certain you are going to have a pretty good time by the first time Grouch says something, then you’re lying. Still, they never would have worked on film during the silent era.

Well, Harpo would. So much so that—as much as I would want to talk about the greatness of Groucho—I think this review should be a celebration of everything that is Harpo. How good is Harpo? Consider the scene in the film where he, Chico and Ricardo Baroni (Allan Jones, pulling Zeppo duties for the proceedings) are being served pasta while being stowaways on an ocean liner. Chico smirks through the event, like he does through pretty much every scene he ever committed to film. Baroni blandly stares his way through getting a plate, impatiently waiting for the next opportunity to croon. In the high peak of the Depression, Harpo looks at that plate of spaghetti with such a longing that the noodles are liable to solve every problem he ever had. Even Chaplin couldn’t sell that level of hunger in The Gold Rush (1925). If you beat Chaplin at the Tramp game, you’re the greatest of all time. I bow before you, Harpo, and so does Charlie.

*More recently, some scenes shot in IMAX had something of the same problem. Maniacally motion-driven films suddenly got locked down to a static shot when “something big”(tm) had to happen.

**I can’t be the only one who fast forwards through 95% of the music guests on Saturday Night Live, right?

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Slaone, Glenn Anders

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Certainly, Citizen Kane (1941) is the film for which Orson Welles is chiefly remembered, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t his best movie. Many of Welles films, theatrical productions and radio broadcasts are intellectual exercises. His name is made in displays of clever form. The stories themselves are incidental. Now, here he’s working with a very basic noir story: Rough and tumble boy more tough than smart meets girl who may very well be descended from sharks. Two or three dead bodies later, and everyone wishes they hadn’t met in the first place.

But this had to be one that Welles felt more than he thought about, and I mean that in the very best way possible. Produced as the marriage between Welles and Hayworth was coming to an end, that alone is worth the above assessment. So many screen pairings of famed Hollywood couples happen when the couple is just starting to fall in love. If what they feel at that moment is real (far from a guarantee), and if they can translate any of that igniting passion to on-screen chemistry (which hardly ever happens) then that display inevitably feels self-conscious on the part of the performers, even if that self-consciousness is only on the part of us as the audience. Seeing a film capturing an—even relatively amicable—end is fascinating and highly unusual**.

Beyond that, and in the best example of what noir tries to do, every piece of the film seems designed to keep the audience off balance, if not outright confuse them, culminating in the famed house-of-mirrors sequence at the film’s climax. Some have complained about that, but I contend its the film’s greatest strength. We’re not supposed to feel like things are adding up. Why else would Welles have had Hayworth chop off most of her hair and dye what remained blonde?

*Although there is at least an argument to be made that he is better known to future generations as the inspiration for Maurice LaMarche’s portrayal of The Brain… And even that reference may not be all that hip for the kids of today, which is a complete shame.

**The only other example I can readily think of would be Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992)… And there wasn’t anything amicable about that. Infinitely more fascinating on that front, but you probably ought not hold your breath for me writing a review on that film.

RKO 281 (1999)

Director: Benjamin Ross

Cast: Liev Schreiber, James Cromwell, Melanie Griffith, John Malkovich

Have I Seen it Before: I was probably the only 15 year old on the planet who practically gasped when he saw an ad for the film on HBO, and then ensured he stayed home on a Friday night to watch it as it first aired. It was shortly after first seeing this film that the idea occurred to me of trying to graft a fantastical adventure onto the War of the Worlds broadcast. Twenty-plus years later, I’m just now culminating those flitting ideas that this movie put in my head.

Did I Like It: Ultimately, trying to force this story, with all of the implications for Welles (Schreiber) future and the support of Hearst’s (Cromwell) life diminishes things a little bit. Despite ominous hints that he’ll never top the achievement of Citizen Kane (1941), it largely paints Welles as triumphant at the end of the picture. Mank (2020) tries its level-headed best to take Mankiewicz’s (Malkovich) side in the conflict. The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996) covers the topic more thoroughly, and more hauntingly.

But I can’t not love this film. So many depictions of Welles depict him as a pillar of pure—some times tragic, sometimes conniving—genius. This film occasionally has the gall (let’s face it, honesty) to depict him as a fairly young kid who can’t help but doubt his own ability to get the job done. That makes Welles as depicted by Schreiber feel close to what I imagine a twenty-five year old kid with self-destructive impulses given the freedom to do whatever he wanted in Hollywood, however briefly. That feeling helps to offset the unavoidable reality that of all the people to depict Welles on film, Schreiber looks and sounds like the imminently recognizable Welles the least. Come to think of it, only Cromwell and Griffith have any resemblance to the people they depict. Does it really count as a weakness? By all rights it should take me out of the film, but the proceedings manage to hold up just fine.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019)

Director: Adrian Grünberg

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Adriana Barraza

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Reviews were pretty toxic so it just floated right past me.

Did I Like It: And I’m not entirely certain it deserves such a toxic review. It is no worse than my memories of the next most recent entry in the series, Rambo (2008), and I’d challenge another series whose clear heyday was in the 80s to make an entry that doesn’t serve to completely embarrass everyone involved. John Rambo kills a lot of people in an endless series of squib explosions and with an uncontrollable ferocity. It’s not like the recipe for one of these films is complex. One might feel the need to complain about the racist undercurrent through the film, but that probably disingenuously ignoring the rest of the franchise.

I say the movie only manages to avoid complete embarrassment, because it isn’t like I don’t feel a little bit bad for Stallone at the end of this one. For anyone looking for anything remotely on the same scale as Ryan Coogler’s Creed (2015), prepare yourself for disappointment. Then again, those constantly expecting a film as good as Creed are going to spend the majority of their movie-going time living with disappointment. Did we need to know more about what happened to John Rambo (Stallone) after he returned to his family home? Better yet, did we need this film to leave things open for yet another improbably sequel? The story seems so incidental to the character as depicted in First Blood (1982) that I can’t help but wonder if this was a script languishing in some B-movie producers library before someone got around to doing a Control-F and replacing Rambo with a role that could have easily been played by any aging action star.

I can’t seem to find any reference to back it up, but I have the strongest memory that at some point that there was plan to have Rambo square off with an alien invader. Now that would have been a film worth writing home about.

Easy Rider (1969)

Director: Dennis Hopper

Cast: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah…

Did I Like It: This film might very well be the single greatest argument for the auteur theory. The entire experience is what one imagines having a conversation with Dennis Hopper must have been like, especially at that time. It’s digressive and almost always chaotic. The only real passages which feel like a real movie taking flight are those where Jack Nicholson incontrovertibly introduced himself to the world as a movie star for the ages. 

And yet, there are occasional moments of profundity. The palpable discomfort—their most rational thought by the time the film comes to a sudden stop—of the nonconformist has never and likely will never be depicted with such lethal efficiency. Even if the complaints of the so-called normal people have become somewhat quaint—to say nothing of the fact that Hopper’s own politics would take a 180 degree turn over the years—the feelings associated with those interactions keep the film surprisingly fresh, more than fifty years later.

Also, after an hour and a half, it still feels like it’s gone on far too long and you’re not entirely sure what the whole thing was about. The prolonged sequence in New Orleans is so aggressively odd, that I’m left wondering if Hopper was a genius, a madman, both, or an absolutely bore pretending to be brilliant and insane. In an effort to try and answer to that question, I even went ahead and listened to Hopper’s commentary tracks. Aside from his warm remarks about Phil Spector, I’m no closer to understanding the man or the film for which he is most remembered.

Maybe that’s the point? Perhaps Hopper hated being pigeonholed so much that his film about rebellion couldn’t help but rebel against the idea of being much of a movie at all.

Mank (2020)

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Charles Dance

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know. It seems unlikely that I would have dodged this one, but I’ve spent more than a few years trying to keep my Orson and Kane-related palette as clean as possible, but no longer! 

Did I Like It: On spec, I’m probably obligated to dislike a movie where Orson Welles (Tom Burke) is clearly one of—if not the—villain of the piece, but honestly? The man probably has that coming. It’s difficult to say who was more put upon by the process of writing Citizen Kane (1941) but if the version of the story supported by Mankiewicz’s supporters (I’m mainly looking in your direction, Pauline Kael) has any degree of truth in it, then Welles was indeed the villain of his greatest triumph.

Stylistically, it feels like maybe Fincher was a bit too precious about the source material here, given that the screenplay was written by his late father. The constant sluglines as a visual motif grate on the nerves more often than not, but given the subject at hand can be forgiven. That obvious not in an effort to tell us this is about a writer doesn’t need to be there, though, it’s still a pretty tight story about a great writer often interacting with other great writers.

And, ultimately we come to the big question when it comes to films who depict Orson Welles in a narrative film. Some are eerie good, others are probably counting on memory of the man being dim in the public consciousness. Thankfully, this lands squarely on the first end of the spectrum. The voice is right, and there are several moments where Mr. Burke actually does look like the Welles of the era. It’s a fate many others have failed to accomplish, although it may help that Welles is far from a main character in the piece, and indeed flits through the proceedings as an ominous phantom.

The Howling (1981)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan, Christopher Stone

Have I Seen it Before: Never… Which ought to be somewhat surprising*.

Did I Like It: Joe Dante is a filmmaker who, for my money, has made an entire library of work while having one hand tied behind his back. There may not be a better forging of filmmaker and material than when Dante made Looney Toons: Back in Action (2002), but the film only managed to be a mildly pleasant diversion. I’ve never quite loved Small Soldiers (1998), even though some people swear by it and on paper I can see the appeal, but not everyone can make a hit every time at bat. Even Spielberg had 1941 (1979). Even Gremlins (1984) is only a glimpse of the unleashed demented genius which was finally given the keys to the studio for Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). Matinee (1993) is pretty great and also disproves the theory a bit. I’ll exchange words with anyone who says otherwise.

So, too, does this movie almost feel like a work of subversive genius, but only in those moments when the money behind a film aren’t paying attention. The film swings somewhat between being a serial killer cat-and-mouse thriller, an body snatcher-style invasion story, a marital drama, and ultimately in its final act the werewolf story advertised. By the time the heroine (Wallace) attempts to take control of the situation, and warn—at great self-sacrifice—the world of what is to come, the world reacts pretty much like the audience of a horror movie might, by shrugging and going on about their lives as if not much of any consequence has happened. It’s a pretty great ending for a movie, and the rest of the film—minus a set of cell-animated werewolves copulating—works against the Joe Dante curse and reaches for that brilliance Hollywood seems to want to stop him from accomplishing.

*To say nothing of the fact that this will be my first film back on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods. Life’s funny sometimes, and there’s always room to move forward and return to what worked in the past.

Mermaids (1990)

Director: Richard Benjamin

Cast: Cher, Bob Hoskins, Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci

Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s been one of those movies which Lora counted as her favorite and put an APB on picking it up if I ever found it on one of my prolonged DVD hunts. Coming up short, I eventually caved and ordered off of Amazon. Not how I normally like to procure my movies—there is something in the hunt I always enjoy—but here we are.

Did I Like It: There are some comedies which are powered entirely by how we feel about spending time with the characters. The story is meaningless, basically, but if we like the characters, everything works out okay for us the audience.

Here is the plot of Mermaids: A single woman and her two daughters move to a new town. The oldest becomes infatuated with a local boy, and kisses him. Because of this, the younger child falls into water and is injured. Everyone survives.

Not much, right? And that’s compounded by the fact that the majority of that synopsis takes place in the last thirty minutes or so, and doesn’t include Lou (Hoskins), one of the lead… because he has very little impact on the film itself. But the characters are quirky enough, and likable enough, and performed well enough, and there’s more than a few deep, sustained belly laughs in the film (“We’re Jewish…”) that everything works out okay for me. I enjoyed my time with them, and in all honesty, I screened the film about a week ago, and I haven’t been able to get Jimmy Soul out of my head most of the time. That has to count for something, right?

But one thing that continues to bug me, aside from parsing out Jimmy Soul’s lyrics. Why the hell is film called Mermaids? I mean, yes, I get Cher’s costume… And the fact that Christina Ricci is intermittently a good swimmer… But aside from that? Winona Ryder is pointedly un-Mermaid, and it feels like she is the main character.

Maybe someone else can explain it to me real slow.

My Favorite Year (1982)

Director: Richard Benjamin

Cast: Peter O’Toole, Mark Linn-Baker, Joseph Bologna, Jessica Harper

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, ages ago. I don’t know why it hasn’t been an absolute staple of my life. I had intentions to run it in the background while I got some work done, and now I’m just sitting here unable to take my eyes away from it all.

Did I Like It: I think that last paragraph tells you quite a bit. I’ve been having a reaction to a number of comedy films lately where the story registers not at all with me. Thus, I’m left only with a feeling for the characters and setting, and, you know, actual laughs. More than a few comedies still elicit a positive reaction from me, even if is increasingly feeling like something is missing.

I’m more than a little pleased to report that this film fires splendidly on all three fronts. I would love to be among the writing staffs of one of the old live comedy shows, so there’s not a moment during the hour and a half run time where I feel bored. The laughs are plentiful, with plenty of one-liners abounding and two physical comedians in O’Toole and Linn-Baker* working their best magic.

And this is the best part: the plot actually works and never lets up on the tension until the end. Its easy to see where this film provided the inspirational backbone of what eventually became 30 Rock. The best that show had to offer was perfectly contained comic tension machines, and that show owes this movie a great debt. My head canon? They take place in the same universe.

*Say what you will about Perfect Strangers—Linn-Baker’s main claim to fame—but both he and Bronson Pinchot knew what they were doing when slapstick was the order of the day.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt*

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, but it’s been a number of years. I was probably a teenager when I first watched it, because, I was, ultimately, that teenager.

Did I Like It: I may be a bad fan of the films of Orson Welles, despite my compulsive need to do homework on the subject. I’ve never fully bought in to the great tragedy of Ambersons. When I first saw it, the whole affair seemed just a bit to twee to get truly invested in, and what’s more, I couldn’t possibly imagine an ending different from the one presented in the theatrical cut.

So I return to the film now. My eye—to say nothing of my taste—is a little more sophisticated. Perhaps the experience will be a bit different now.

And it is, sort of. The story of the Ambersons and their tragedy is just a bit too precious for me, still. In all fairness, it had that quality when I finally brought myself to read the Booth Tarkington novel a few years back, in an effort to gai na bit more insight into the Welles mindset.

But that’s not the point of this film, or any early Welles film, ultimately. Content is incidental. Had he bowed to studio pressure and made War of the Worlds as a feature after he was brought to Hollywood, it would have been the technique behind that story that made a classic film. Citizen Kane (1941) is much the same way. And so is Ambersons. 

Which is what makes the truncated ending so odd to me now. The film has long stretches that are just as vibrant and unexpected as Kane, but it’s all punctuated by one of the more blandly staged scenes of the era. It sticks out like a sore thumb. I really don’t know why a studio would have taken a film away from Welles, especially during this period**. A Welles film not directed by Welles misses the entire point of the exercise.

*For all of the film’s issues, I’ll never understand why Welles himself didn’t play the adult George. He was still the right age at the time. Then again, my main complaint about depictions of Welles in the 30s and 40s is that he always seems far older than a man in his 20s. Maybe he was never very boyish. It would be hard to go from even the younger version of Kane to someone so impish.

**All right, I kind of get it. Any responsible leader of business would probably have a hard time giving Welles a blank check twice at that point in time.

Citizen Kane (1941)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane

Have I Seen it Before: Silly question at this point, right?

Did I Like It: I usually get a bit trigger-shy when writing up a review of any unusually iconic film. What is left to say about some films? This goes doubly for a film like this. 

I could write about the story of the making of the film, arguably more famous than the film itself. In an oblique way, I probably already have. I could write about the psychology on display, but that would probably not cover the 300-word minimum of these reviews. 

There’s probably a book someone (please, not me) somewhere (please, somewhere else) somewhen (please, let’s give it a few years) should write about how its allegedly Donald Trump’s favorite movie, which only really tells me that—in addition to all manner of things—the former president doesn’t understand 

On that note, it’s usually not a bad idea to distrust practically anyone—save for perhaps the recently departed Peter Bogdanovich*—who claims this is their favorite film. Met with a rather infamous degree of commercial hostility on its initial release, its not hard to imagine that far fewer people have actually seen it than claim to have done so**. 

So, about the film. I think Welles would be the first to admit that the story is on the main, fairly melodramatic. Big tycoon careens through his life, pretty much destroying everything he even thinks about touching, and in the end it’s largely because he never wanted to be rich and just wanted to spend a little more time with his sled.

Sad, yes. Earth shattering? Hardly. It helps that the film’s plot is constantly in a state of deconstructing and reconstituting itself, but even that only pushes the film into the unusual-but-not-quite-unique realm. Any film interested in tapping into the literary attributes of novels*** would opt for a similar structure. Kurosawa comes to mind.

The true strengths of the film, which go far beyond anything having to do with the sled lie with the technical craft on display. While the true possibility—and, clearly, the horrible potential—of silent film was ushered by The Birth of a Nation (1915) and for my money, perfected by Modern Times (1936), sound film had wallowed as not much more than turgid recordings of stage productions. See Dracula (1931) and yes, even—with all its strengths—The Great Dictator (1940). This film finally made the argument for the sound picture (barely ten years after the technology was seemingly perfected) by showing what all of the tools of cinema could do if brought to bear. Deep focus, optical printing, miniature, matte paintings, all are harnessed to tell a story not of fantasy, but of human tragedy. Few think of Citizen Kane as a special effects film, but that’s what it is. One of the key scenes where Kane (Welles) fires his old friend Jed Leland (Cotten) is heralded as a great example of deep focus, but that’s not what’s happening. The two characters are shot at different times, and optically forged together in a single frame of film. People complain about our highly technological style of making films where actors don’t ever have to be in the same room, but they’ve been innovating those methods for 80 years! It’s even COVID compliant!

That’s the film’s secret: it is a great film. It demands to be studied and learned about for its cinematic attributes. If you haven’t seen it, I’m not sure how you’ve made it this far on the site, but you should. If you’ve seen it before, it never really took hold with you, and you love cinema, then you need to see it again. And again. And read books about it. Then listen to the commentary tracks on the DVD. Go back to it as often as possible. I know I have.

*During my rewatch of the film this week, I did the regular film, and the commentary track from Roger Ebert, but somehow didn’t take in Bogdanovich’s track. May have to make amends for that sometime soon.

**I was on a podcast once where I had joked about never seeing the film. One of the other people on the panel cried, as if it finally connected us, “Me too!” They were aware of my other work. They had even reacted to my social media posts when I went to a 75th anniversary screening back in 2016. They were (and one imagines, still are) an idiot. I didn’t think that my review of this film would end up as a compare and contrast of my irritation with this person, and a few comments of Trump, but here we are, 2021.

***Has anyone ever tried to novelize Kane? Feels vaguely sacrilegious to even entertain such an idea, but it could be an interesting intellectual exercise. Let’s make that another project I should never again entertain. 

Gremlins (1984)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Dick Miller

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, certainly.

Did I Like It: There are two types of Gremlins fans. The Danteians, and the Columbites. The first group will show up for the series* for the chaos of it all. They might be part Gremlins themselves, if we dared to map their genome. They may like this film, but they love Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). The Columbites view the original film as a grim exercise in suburban horror. They live for the Santa-in-the-chimney monologue. They think this film is better if Mr. and Mrs. Futterman (Miller and Jackie Joseph) died at the end of Mr. Futterman’s plow. They think the second film is silly.

Only one group is right, and you’re not going to need two guesses to find out into which camp I fall.

Sure, the rules governing the balance between Mogwai and Gremlin make no sense, and we’ll have to wait for a whole additional movie before that absurdity is embraced, but it’s not entirely this film’s fault that its sequel completely eats its lunch I can never look upon Kingston Falls and not be taken completely out of the film. It’s Hill Valley, and they’re absolutely shooting on the Universal backlot, but this film actually precedes Back to the Future (1985).

The creature effects here age poorly, but we know they do get better. That’s just six years worth of progress working against this film. If you think that I’m just being needlessly negative about the film, I think Warner Bros. tends to agree with me. Almost every promotional image of Gizmo for this film is actually an image of him from the sequel.

But even if this film is written by Chris Columbus and can’t help but reflect his ethos, Joe Dante can’t help but author some portions of the film. The villains’ collective decision to cease their reign of terror in favor of a late night screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) is peak chaotic energy, and fundamentally makes the film a comedy, regardless of what Mr. Columbus may have typed all those years ago. Then there’s, my favorite scene when Mr. Pelzer (Axton) is calling home from the inventor’s convention. Robby the Robot (from Forbidden Planet (1956) is there. The Time Machine (from George Pal’s The Time Machine (1969) is there (and then it isn’t). It’s just a little bit of chaos leaking into the film. IS it enough to raise it above the sequel in my estimation? No, but it is an appetizer to the feast that is soon to follow.

*By the way, HBOMax, while we’re on the subject… I was promised an animated Gremlins series in 2021. Joe Dante himself was consulting with it. What happened there? The internet seems to think that it will now come some time in 2022… I guess we’ll see.