Past seven days

A variety of movies this week on DVD, but still got to see some new movies in theatres.  This holiday weekend I hope to catch a re-release of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the new Muppets film.  Nostalgia rules!

Hugo
Ladies in Retirement
Matinee
Mr. Nobody
The Descendants
The Dominici Affair
The Hour (BBC)
The Spirit
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

Lady on a Train

Here's another old movie that takes place during the Christmas holidays.  It is based on a novel by Leslie Charteris, noted for being the author of the Simon Templar aka The Saint stories.  Lady on a Train stars actress/snger Deanna Durbin in one of her adult roles.  During Christmastime, Durbin is a train passenger Nikki, and while her train is stopped, she looks inside a building and sees a murder. She tries to convince the police what she saw was real, but they don't because she reads a lot of crime novels and they think she's making it up. It is a typical amateur detective movie.  She decides to investigate on her own, finds out who the dead man is, sneaks into his house, and--being mistaken for his mistress, a nightclub singer--is told she inherits his estate.

Nikki tries to get a mystery writer (David Bruce) to help her. Ralph Bellamy plays the nice nephew of the dead man who could care less about the money. There's also another ne'er do well nephew and a disapproving aunt. At the same time Nikki's trying to evade another member of the family who is after some evidence.

Every now and again she breaks into song (Night and Day by Cole Porter is the one I remember from watching this on TV years ago), even taking time for a costume change and new hairstyle even though the bad guys are still after her.

The film is more screwball comedy than murder mystery. It even has Edward Everett Horton, who played Fred Astaire's comical second fiddle in a lot of the early Astaire & Rogers films. William Frawley has a small part as a desk sergeant at the police station.

It manages to keep you guessing who the murder is and the contrivances are not too major--modern romantic comedies are just as fluffy. This is a light comedy with some good singing by Durbin.

Felicidades

Many Christmas stories deal with loneliness, with characters finding it difficult to come to terms with their life situations. In Felicidades, a film from Argentina, several unrelated people on Christmas Eve try to reach their goals of connecting with certain people in their lives.

Four Christmases

I think it's pretty hard to make a bad holiday movie. At the most it might be too sappy or sentimental but usually inoffensive, something you could leave playing on the TV while baking the holiday cookies. Four Christmases seems to go out of its way to show some really offensive people, I suppose in an attempt to show how the main characters played by Vince Vaughan and Reese Witherspoon have legitimate reasons for abandoning their respective families during the holiday season.

Brad and Kate (Vaughan and Witherspoon, who also were some of the co-producers of this film), both of divorced parents, lie to their families that they cannot join them for the Christmas holidays due to job commitments. They actually have an exotic vacation planned for themselves. But when they are seen on TV during a news segment about airports being snowed in, their families insist they visit all four of them at their respective homes.

We see the broad comedic hijinks that take place at each of the homes, filled with precocious and bullying kids, and parents (Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight) who insist on having things their own way, of course making it a pretty miserable four visits for the couple. Along the way, Brad and Kate learn things about each other that at first damage their relationship then bring them closer.

This is mostly a broad comedy, with nothing too new in the way of jokes. Out of all the actors, Vince Vaughan was actually not bad, I always think of him as an SOB but he made Brad pretty likeable. But that was contrasted to the rest of the characters. Some the actors playing parents, Duvall and Spacek, had such bad roles that I don't know why they didn't insist on some rewriting. Steenburgen played a pretty common role for herself, a "cougar." Voight, as the last visited parent, of course had the emotional heart that Brad and Kate were supposed to relate to.

The kid characters were monstrous, vulgar and ill-mannered, these are not the types of child actors' careers that turn into the Lindsay Lohans of tomorrow. Brad's family had a violent and foulmouthed kid who was into cage fighting (like the rest of the men in the family) and Kate had a niece who taunted another aunt, basicaly a mean girl in the making.

With the families being such bad characters, the film really needed to show how each of the four families had a heart or soul for the audience to sympathize with, and to make Brad and Kate realize that even with their families' flaws, they are "Family" that one cannot abandon or disown. I didn't find this at all in the story, or it wasn't done realistically enough for me to care (even if it is just a comedy). As expected, there is a happy ending. I did laugh a couple times, when the brother and his wife were playing a board game. But there was little holiday joy in this movie.

Past seven days

A couple of fun events this past week.  The 50th Anniversay screening of West Side Story that was sponsored by Turner Movie Classics cable channel, an entity that continues to revitalize old movies for a new audience.  Also, The Artist, getting a lot of Oscar buzz.

A Town Called Panic
Backyard
Clash of the Titans
The Artist
The Music Never Stopped
Tower Heist
West Side Story

Last Holiday (1950)

I don't know what it is about holiday stories that get made and remade year after year. Certainly Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has had many incarnations, I'm willing to bet that is the most remade holiday story.

One remake of Last Holiday starred the entertainer Queen Latifah. But the earlier version starred a gentle Alec Guinness. He plays an agricultural machinery salesman, George Bird, who has just been told he has an incurable disease. In a daze, he cashes out his savings and life insurance and takes a last holiday, hoping to spend his last days in a happy state. He decides to spend time in the posh Pinebourne Hotel, where the clientele is select.

West Side Story Pt. 2

Turner Movie Classics re-released this to theatres last week since it was the film's 50th Anniversary.  It was part of their film festival of earlier this year, where they go around the country and screen old classics on the big screen.  Here in Chicago we were treated to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  Last year we got North by Northwest.  Both are great films to watch for the first, or the hundredth, time in the theatre, and it was great to see how these classics still attract new, younger audiences.

This was the case as well for West Side Story.  It truly is one to watch on a big screen.  There were trivia clips during the preview, then a recorded Q&A by TCM host Robert Osborne that took place during their film fest.  The guests were co-writer Arthur Laurents, Oscar-winning supporting actor George Chakiris, and voice artist Marni Nixon, who subbed for Natalie Wood in the singing.  Each talked about their experiences and enjoyment in working on the film, as well as the history of how each of them came to be involved in this iconic work.

This screening was one that really captured the audience's attention as well as what I could tell were their fond memories.  Throughout the film, their was a collective feeling of nostalgia among the audience, and if you know the film it is not hard to understand why for so many years its artistry has engendered such fond memories and tributes.  Its emotional ending still evoked strong feelings and tears, the songs still singable, the comedy and dancing still bringing out those old emotions time and again.

The Italian Job

Michael Caine must love a good heist. He's certainly done many heist movies, mostly in the 1960s and 70s. He's still doing them, in such films as Flawless and even in a way, Inception.  It is easy to see why The Italian Job was remade. The story is nearly not even about what he is stealing (I think in moviespeak it would be considered a Macguffin), but really about the heist and equally so the subsequent excellent car chase/escape. It even includes a great cliffhanging ending (literally).

Caine plays a con, Charlie, just released from prison. An old associate has just been killed and leaves him the plans for a big score, $4 million in gold in Turin, Italy. Charlie can't resist this heist, but needs help, so he asks for backing from Mr. Bridger (Noel Coward), a mobster who is conducting business as usual from prison.

Tower Heist

Tower Heist stars established comic actors Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy.  Alan Alda plays a villainous businessman who scams the employees of a luxury apartment tower in New York City, where Stiller and others work.  The story starts out by showing how Josh (Stiller), as the building's manager, has worked hard to make the lives of the affluent tenants in The Tower easy.  He knows their every little whim, but he knows all their habits and secrets too.  Without the knowledge of his co-workers he has invested their pensions with Arthur (Alda), a businessman whom he finds out later has used the money in a ponzi scheme and defrauded all the savings of the "little people" who work in the building. 

Into the Abyss

I think this is the third or fourth documentary of Werner Herzog's I've watched. As with the others his personal passion about his subject is evidently displayed.

This documentary focuses on the case of a Texan who is on death row.  Herzog interview this young man as well as his cohort in crime--who was also convicted and is in prison; the cohort's father, who has been in and out of correctional facilities all his life and contemplates how this has affected the life of his son (as well as another son who is also in prison); relatives of a couple of the murder victims; an ex-executioner who no longer could deal emotionally with his job and had to quit; a policeman who worked on this particular case; and a woman who was some sort of caseworker for the cohort and eventually married him (the film did not make clear what her initial involvement was on his case).

In the interviews Herzog asks questions about their feelings and experiences, as well as injects some of his own views about capital punishment. Although I can understand that a filmmaker can have a passion about any particular subject, I find Herzog kind of invasive and in this particular film I was not really sure what his object was. Supposedly it was to show his personal anti-death penalty views, but it felt more like he was indulging himself (as I feel he does also in other docs) by having the opportunity to support his passion by pushing people to say and do more than they want, to give people their fifteen minutes of fame whether they want it or not. The title talks about an "abyss" but the film doesn't really address this.

The Artist

This French film played at the Chicago International Film Festival this year as its Closing Night film.  It stars Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, as silent film stars in Hollywood.  The story is a little bit A Star is Born, a little bit Singin' In the Rain.  Dujardin, as popular star george Valentin (no doubt a play on Rudolf Valentino) has enjoyed a successful career as a leading man in silent films.  It is now the mid-1920s.  Bejo is pretty young thing Peppy Miller, hoping to make it big in Hollywood, and they have a "meet-cute" at a premiere.  Valentin, despite being married, is taken with her.  As her star rises, his falls, due to two key events of that time.

CIFF 2011: King of Devil's Island

There are so many real stories in history that I wonder why filmmakers tread into remake territory.  The great acting in King of Devil's Island (even with its Titanic-type ending) is strong throughout, showing how the friendship of two boys can outlast the abuse they and others suffered in a prison-like reform school, in this true story from Norway in the early 1900s.

The Color of Magic

Terry Pratchett is a fantasy comedy writer with a big library of titles based on his fantastical flat-as-a-pancake creation, the Discworld. It is a place filled with inept wizards, smart witches, vampires, wolfmen and trolls, and every creature in between. Among my favorite storylines are those that involve the witch Granny Weatherwax and her friends, and Death and his adopted granddaughter Susan.

This second live action film based on Pratchett's works is a combination of the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, as well as The Light Fantastic, and involves the dotty wizards at Unseen University, who do their utmost to retain tenure while shirking as much work as possible.

Past seven days

I guess I am on a documentary kick this week.  I caught the new doc by Werner Herzog, Into the Abyss, as well as several on DVD.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Behind the Burly Q
Into the Abyss
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Lipstick & Dynamite
Man Hunt

Free event: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth observes why this public housing project in the 1950s was not able to achieve its goal of offering affordable housing for low income, and eventually an all black, population in St. Louis.  As with many public housing projects, this complex fell in decline with lack of government maintenance and infusion of high crime.  The film points a light at this issue, but it is hard to find any answers for this or any other attempt to successfully integrate low-income housing into an uban setting.

Northwestern University's Block Museum is hosting this screening.


The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Thursday, November 10
7:00 p.m.
Northwestern University, Block Museum of Art, Blcok Cinema
40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL

Free event: Double Victory

Have you heard of the new movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, a black pilot's infantry during World War II?
In a lead up to the new movie Red Tails, the DuSable Museum is hosting a documentary about the Airmen, called Double Victory.  When speaking about our "greatest generation" people of color are rarely mentioned.  It's remarkable that these films continue to tell the stories of veterans of color.  Two of the actual airmen will be available for a Q&A.


Double Victory
Wednesday, November 2
7:00 p.m.
DuSable Museum
740 East 56th Place

Past seven days

A pretty light week for me, some TV watching but mostly long work days taking my time. I'm throwing in the two short films I watched as part of Vincentennial, a celebration honoring the 100th birthday year of Vincent Price.

Anonymous
House on Haunted Hill
The Double
The Last Man on Earth
Thriller music video
Vincent

West Side Story

I appreciate that studios are re-screening old favorites on the big screen.  During this past year I have seen Ghostbusters (with an audience that was largely younger than the film itself, a surprise to me), Back to the Future, and Taxi Driver during a milestone anniversary year for each of those films.  So many films do not really need a big screen enhancement, but others, like West Side Story, deserve and is made better by seeing it on the big screen. 

It screens one day only in Chicago, see you there!