Movie Update 17

And here's the rest of the current crop. I think I'll be watching at least four movies a week for the next six weeks, so... yeah. Busy.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High


This was the first movie Cameron Crowe wrote, although it was directed by Amy Heckerling. Kind of a standard high school sex comedy, but a well-written one, and I think it probably set a lot of standards for that particular genre. Jennifer Jason Leigh is the female lead and I thought her character was an interesting examination of a late bloomer type of girl, but I thought the standouts were Judge Reinhold as her older brother, who's just kind of a likable guy, and Sean Penn especially as the stoner Jeff Spicoli. It's not that it's a particularly difficult part to play, but I thought he actually brought a surprising amount of sadness to the role. Weird comment I guess, but hey, the movie has that scene where Phoebe Cates takes her red bikini top off.

The Lady Eve


Much like Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve is a good old comedy with some odd touches, like the opening credits featuring an animated snake. Henry Fonda is a rich heir to an ale fortune, and on a boat ride back to home a father and daughter pair of con artists attempt to take him in a high stakes card game. But the daughter, played by Barbara Stanwyck ends up falling for him after she sees how earnestly he feels towards her. Of course things get complicated once Fonda realizes who she really is. What follows is a mix of romantic comedy and some noir elements (mostly revolving around the femme fatale archetype) that generally works. Fonda's character is a bit too dumb to be believable and the plot sort of gives up on justifying the characters' actions at a certain point, but the dialogue and main performances are strong enough to pull it all together into a solid movie anyway. Flawed, but fun.

The Last Picture Show


I liked this one a hell of a lot, for reasons I'm not sure I can totally explain. It's another coming of age movie, although it treats the sexual subject matter with a lot more frankness that most movies, even ones made today, do. There's a certain melancholy about the whole thing, with characters passing and businesses closing, it sort of reflects the idea of small towns disappearing without getting too preachy about it. It's also notable for featuring a performance by an extremely young Jeff Daniels, before he had fully mastered the art of acting. The movie drifts a bit and is far from the most easily entertaining one on this list (in fact it's pretty easily the most humorless), but it just worked for me.

Roman Holiday


A nice movie about a gorgeous girl and a handsome man having fun in a beautiful city. Audrey Hepburn plays a princess of some country who's visiting in Rome, when she gets fed up with her controlled lifestyle and decides to run away for a night. She ends up spending time with a reporter played by Gregory Peck, who at first just wants a story, but changes his mind once he starts having feelings for her. He also has a photographer friend he abuses rampantly without repercussion. It's not the funniest comedy or the most emotional romance, but it's a good film all around, and it features one of the best endings I've ever seen in this type of movie. They often sacrifice realism for the sake of the story, but that's not the case here, and it works extremely well. It was definitely the part of the film that impressed me the most.

Movie Update 15

A bunch of movies this weekend, as several were about to disappear from my Netflix streaming queue. Let's get right to it.

Bananas


One of Woody Allen's earliest films, starring him as a sort of a deadbeat who moves to a South American country in the middle of a revolution after his activist girlfriend dumps him. This movie was quite strange to me, as it mixes Allen's natural film technique and some pretty Woody Allen jokes like the giving and receiving conversation with a lot of really silly and over the top gags that don't quite fit. Stuff like his dad making him assist on a surgery when he's saying goodbye or the whole courtroom scene would feel more in place if the whole thing was a wacky spoof like Airplane!. I did enjoy the movie, though. Lots of great gags prop up a simple story.

Defiance


On the one hand, Edward Zwick should be commended for finding a way to tell a story about a Jewish resistance against Nazi occupation in Belarus with a Hollywood budget. On the other, after seeing movies with similar subject matter like Come and See, I kind of wish he had taken a smaller budget and just made a slightly better movie. I respect him for focusing on unexplored parts of history in his work, but Defiance as a whole feels kind of whitewashed. It's a pretty decent movie, but too much is just standard American war movie stuff. Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber give very good central performances, and their Belarusian accents sounded pretty good even if I still don't like the compromise of having a non-American character speak with an accent rather than his actual language. Really nice cinematography, too.

Jerry Maguire


This movie had a huge impact on popular culture at the time, and was nominated for a bunch of awards, but I don't think it really holds up as a great film. It was on AFI's list of the top 10 sports movies, but they must have been stuck at 9, because it's not actually a sports movie. Yeah, Tom Cruise plays a sports agent and a big part of the movie is his relationship with Cuba Gooding Jr's wide receiver character, but it's much more a romantic comedy, and a story about a man learning how to connect to people. He could have been in almost any other kind of business and it would have been the same movie. There are several iconic lines in the movie that are kind of entertaining to watch unfold, especially when Cruise is overselling them. The whole movie is sort of overly sappy and emotional, but it's slick and amusing enough to keep it watchable for most of the time it's on. Gooding is really quite entertaining too, though it doesn't strike me as the typical award winning performance.

A Night at the Opera


This is the Marx Brothers' follow-up to Duck Soup; their first film at a new studio and without their brother Zeppo. The plot is less out-there than Soup's, featuring Groucho, Chico, and Harpo as a few guys who travel with an opera company to America and try to help a down-on-his-luck singer score with someone else in the company and get the break he deserves. What really interests me is how the brothers continue to be giant assholes to everyone, even if they don't deserve it. The only people resembling antagonists here are the boss who doesn't want to give the singer a job until he has a better reputation, and a man who is his rival professionally and personally. But the first is just making a smart business decision, and the second never really does anything wrong, he just has more status as a singer and is also attracted to the same beautiful woman. It doesn't matter though, the film considers them the bad guys, and they get their shit ruined by the brothers constantly. The crowning moment comes at the end when the boss finally agrees to sign their friend, and while Groucho and Chico are debating the contract, Harpo tears open the boss' tuxedo jacket for no reason. God, I love the Marx Brothers.

Scarface


Most people probably don't know that the Brian De Palma film starring Al Pacino is actually a remake of this, which is loosely based on the life of Al Capone. It comes right out at the beginning and denounces both organized crime and the government for not doing a better job of fighting it, and then tells the story of a man's rise to prominence and eventual downfall in the 1920s underworld of violence and illegal booze. It's an early film by Howard Hawks, and I think I would have liked it a lot more if it wasn't for Paul Mini's performance as the titular character. I really can't stand it. Tony Camonte bounces around, getting overly confrontational, pursuing his boss' girlfriend while flipping his shit when his sister so much as looks at a guy (what, is he hoping she'll join a convent?), and generally acts like a jackass. I'm aware that crime movies are built on their central figures being bad people, but they're supposed to be redeemable or at least likable in some way so we don't get annoyed whenever they're on screen. It's something they just hadn't figured out yet. Important and fairly well made movie, but a hard one to enjoy.