The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

Saw The Lady From Shanghai and oh boy how I loved it!  It was a fairly classy noir film written, acted, and directed by Orson Welles.  It follows a Irish sailor who saves a pretty, rich woman from being raped and she, in return, hires him on to the crew of her husband's yacht.  From there, they discover that he has a criminal past and he begins to be pulled into their webs of semi-serious games, as they taunt each other and threaten divorce and humiliation and murder.

The film is fairly by-the-numbers with rich old men and beautiful broads, hats and guns.  The engine that drives much of the film for me is to see how innocent the pretty wife is.  Is she the naive bait being dangled by her sinister husband?  Or is she the true Svengali, pulling everyone's strings?  But all of this is beside the point for me.  I just loved the excesses of the noir genre on display here.  At one point the wife mumbles a song to the camera as her face fills the screen.  There's hideously ugly old women who scream and point at the gunman, a courthouse scene with a befuddled judge, and there's even a climactic shootout in a fun-house hall of mirrors that has to be seen to be believed!

If the behind-the-scenes trivia is to be believed, the film was fit so firmly into the noir mold by studio execs.  Indeed, the film doesn't achieve the levels of restraints and polish of, say, The Magnificent Ambersons (or Citizen Kane of course, for that matter) but I appreciated the simplicity of the results.  This film isn't interested in subverting or reinventing anything.  It's interested in digging so deeply into the noir groove that it strikes gold.

Vox Lux (2018)

Saw Vox Lux, a film about a pop star's childhood and rise to fame.  Once the rise is established and just starts to begin, we quickly skip directly to the denouement: the staggering, drugged, drunken, weeping mess she has become in adulthood (ie: 31)  I watched the film hoping for some glorious over-the-top pop numbers and theatrics, maybe some delicious melodrama, but unfortunately the film felt more tawdry and kind of sad than glitzy or dramatic.  It was more tabloid and less music video.  Maybe I've become old, or maybe the film just had something else on its mind.

The film is fairly dismal and dour.  Everyone is dressed in rhinestones and leather, but they are all miserable and concerned and sad.  The film opens with a narration by the deep, dry voice of Willem Dafoe, telling us in true-crime tones about the girl's childhood.  She's catapulted to fame after she sings a song during a memorial service in the 90s and later on, during her rise to fame, 9/11 coincides with another pivotal life moment.  Finally, in the present day of 2018, some terrorists wear masks styled after one of her music videos.  The arc of the main character's life mirrors the evolution of modern American fears.

The end of the movie provided the best payoff for me, where it's revealed (spoilers here.  Highlight to see) she sold her soul to the devil.  This brings a lot of the film into coherency but makes the parallel with real, post-9/11 history confusing and muddy.  What's the parallel?  It feels muddy and muddled and kind of in poor taste.

I don't know.  This film disappointed m.  This may be my fault for judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree, but I went in hoping for hysterics and hopefully some catchy tunes, but left with dour, pessimistic meditations on America's continued descent mirrored by the dissipation of this pop star.  A grim, taught little film.

The Dead (1987)

Saw The Dead, a film based on the James Joyce short story of the same name (which I know I have read but which I do not remember.)  The film depicts a family party hosted by spinster aunts sometime in the early 1900s (I suppose.)  Like a visit to grandma's house, the film is fairly slow and tame and quaint, but also touching and strangely poignant too.

The film's most main characters are a husband and wife who are both sensible and pleasant people.  They get along well, but there's a foreshadowed undercurrent of tension between them though.  The wife is strangely intent when a guest recites a poem about a woman breaking a man's heart, and there's a few scenes where the husband seems oblivious or cold to the wife.  What's going on between them is explored more at the end, so I won't spoil it here.

As you might guess from the name, the theme of the film is death and memento mori.  The spinster aunts are nearing death and are precious in their fragility.  They reminisce over dead singers and there's talk of monks who sleep in their own coffins to keep the certainty of death near by.  The closing of the film has a long monologue about the dead and us the living.

The film is very soothing, very stultifying.  It's slow and quaint in a kind of BBC Charles Dickens kind of way.  It's really like a visit to gandma's.  It's not a blast and it's not the most fun you might have, but you feel better for having watched it and you feel lighter as a result.  It was a sweet little film.