Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

Saw Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), a film by John Ford about Lincoln's career as a lawyer.  Therefore, it's a court-room drama with sudden reveals and shouted confessions and judges shouting "Order! Order!" and so on.  It's pretty stirring, but it doesn't seem to extend beyond the stirring climactic courtroom drama.  If there are echoes and parallels to Lincoln's presidency, they are not obvious enough for me to pick up on, with my scant knowledge.

The film is the usual thing for John Ford: sentimental and big on the virtues of simple folks and simple values.  Lincoln is portrayed as reading a lawbook lackadaisically, lying on his back by a river.  It's very picturesque and twee.  Thankfully, due to what Lincoln was like as a person, we don't get John Wayne or some other butch paragon out-manning everyone else.  Instead we get a shy and awkward scarecrow, dressed in black, trying to break into politics but unable to enter a dance floor.  It's endearing, even as Ford refuses to sell it that way.

I enjoyed that part of the film and I guess I enjoyed the whole film pretty well in general.  Courtroom dramas are always pretty compelling.  It would be nice if it had some kind of broader theme to draw about the comin civil war, but it does end with mounting storm clouds, and this is a better movie than I could have made.  It was enough.

Leave the World Behind (2023)

Saw Leave the World Behind (2023).  It was a frustrating movie.  It follows a family of husband & wife & son & daughter as they drive out of New York City into the wilds of Long Island for a little impromptu vacation.  Alas, during the vacation something goes terribly terribly wrong in the outside world and all cellphones and TVs go dead.  The exact nature of the disaster never really gets clearly spelled out, but it certainly evokes the early days of the coronavirus pandemic or the shocked chaos of Jan 6th or the bleakest predictions of climate change.  The film is very timely and clearly has big things on its mind.

The frustrating bit is that it's also sort of dumb.  There's scenes where it intercuts many unfolding disasters at the same time to mutually heighten the multiple climaxes of the various plot lines but both times this happens at least one of the so-called "climaxes" is just a non-event, like someone being freaked out by a herd of deer or a kid telling a scary story.  The film is 150 minutes long.  Couldn't we just cut that bit? And I'm going to be mean for a minute here, but at one point the dad of the family is going to drive out to town looking for some news about what's going on.  He encounters a plane that's dropping leaflets.  Stumbling and clumsy in his abject terror, he drives his car as fast as it will drive away from the … information he was … going out to find … ?

Anyway, but the characters in the film say a lot of the right things.  They talk about how we all collectively tend to turn a blind eye to developing disasters until it's too late, how we kid ourselves that we can just buy the right things and somehow spend our way to a more perfect world.  This is rightly called out as the willful ignorance that it is.  Similarly, there's a paraphrase of Alan Moore's insight into conspiracy theories (ie: "The truth is far more frightening: nobody is in control.") which is useful to keep in mind.

There's also some nice work done to symbolically tie the main characters to urban civilization: they always wear blue which is a color which doesn't occur much in nature.  The wife also works in PR and the husband is a professor of Media Studies, and their kids are always on their devices.  At one point they literally say they cannot do anything useful without a cellphone in their hands. (I kept thinking of boomer memes about how kids can't use analog clocks or read cursive.)

But I don't know, the movie just frustrated me.  It seemed unrealistic and clumsy but also like it was trying very hard to be worldly and clear-eyed and grounded.  It came off like a conversation with a teenager whose heart is in the right place, but who is more filled with passion than plans.  It's clearly got things on its mind, but it's not clear how those genuinely interesting things connect to the wild imagery and mounting excitement that's driving it.  I couldn't make it cohere anyway, maybe you'll have better luck.

Lolita (1962)

Saw Lolita (1962).  Ok, here we go.  It's times like this I'm glad that this blog is only read by about 3 people because this film is an adaptation of the Nabokov book by the same name which is famous for somehow disabling everyone's media literacy.  This film is pretty true to that legacy.  Here we go.

The film is about a pedophile named Humbert Humbert who falls in love with Lolita, the 12-year old daughter of his landlady.  The source novel is written from his point of view and, if you read between the lines, elides and omits many details in order to frame the abuse as romantic and reciprocated.  There are some stories which try to cultivate sympathy for the pedophile (The Woodsman comes to mind) but this is not one of those films.  We are supposed to be outraged by his hypocrisy and his willful self-delusion, slowly dawning on us as we realize he is an unreliable narrator.  This film plays a similar trick but it's much more subtle.  We don't get narration from Humbert, for example, and we are never clued in to the fact that this film is from a Humbertish point of view.  You need to read between the lines.

Humbert ultimately runs away with Lolita to pursue an abusive relationship and the film is roughly divided into two halves: before the runaway and after.  Before the runaway the film is shot like a 1960s sex comedy, with lonely piano teachers and widows clad in cougarish leopard print.  Humbert is uninterested in all of this tawdry flirting, but in this hot-house atmosphere, Lolita's teenage contempt for her mother comes off like a romantic rivalry with Humbert as the imagined object of her jealousy.  After the runaway, the film shifts into more of a thriller, as policemen, doctors, teenage boys, and casting directors all vie for Lolita's attention.  Once again, her fear about what's happening takes on a double meaning to Humbert: her secretiveness and lies are not because she wants to escape (he imagines) but because she is falling for some other man.

Finally, the film plays a last trick on us of indicting our society in Lolita's exploitation.  Lolita is made to be seductive, often propping her feet up, showing off long legs, her smooth face crinkling as she says "Gee, well keep in touch!"  Through Humbert's eyes, we never really see her trying to escape his grasp.  What she's actually doing away from him remains a mystery.  The trappings of the sex comedy and thriller genres also act to obscure what's really going on.  It's easy to fall into the mindset of these genres, and we have to keep reminding ourselves that this is a lens we're seeing through.  The seeming romantic rival is just a snotty teenager acting out and the seeming femme fatale is just a scared teenage girl, thrust into a situation beyond her years.

This film is a sort of dark comedy, a satire which uses the cliches of other films to convey the warped understanding of the protagonist.  It is not obvious satire however and it's apparently very easy to miss satire even when it's quite blunt.  As with the novel, I suspect that some people will view this as somehow condoning the events in the film, apologizing rather than condemning.  I suspect also that, like with Wall Street and Romper Stomper, the very folks the film attempts to skewer will wind up enjoying it sincerely.

Alas, a daring and complex film which is only becoming more fraught and problematic over time.  It's not a bad film, but a difficult one.

The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

Saw The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), a Bubsy Berkly musical farce about a theater company which is able to put on one last big show (aren't they always one last big show?) due to a surprise injection of cash from an upcoming composer.  Now, I feel to say more would spoil the film a little, so let's be vague: the film involves the showgirls gleefully fleecing a domineering financier.  The stage production that they're putting on is the usual thing for Bubs: a random smattering of spectacular nonsense completely disconnected to the main plot and to each other.  The one notable exception to this is the show-stopping final number, The Forgotten Man, which pays homage to the abandoned veterans of WW1.  It's very moving.

The point of the film is the dance numbers.  The plot zips along and this is pre-code, so there's swearing and kissing and all manner of immoral licentiousness, but the core idea of rolling a well-to-do villain is a little dated and the 20s-style patter, although witty, is never really laugh-out-loud.  Oh but those dance sequences!  Let me tell you!

In one of the sequences, the chorus girls play violins.  In the middle of the sequence the lights go out and the violins light up with fluorescent tubes as the dancers circle and make complex geometric patterns for Bubsy's signature crane shot.  In one scene, we focus up real tight on a woman's gloved hand holding a white rose against an ink black background.  The visual is striking!  Such pretty choreography, such a strange mixture of pokey old fashion and timeless dazzle.

The film is interesting, but a little aged.  Be aware that you're going in to an old-timey film and you'll be fine.  There's no blackface, mercifully, and the war of the sexes ends at stealing a rich bad guy's money.  If you can stomach that, go see the film.  It's worth seeing at least one Bubsy Berkly film, just to see what all the fuss is about.

The Silence (1963)

Saw The Silence, a film following a boy and his mother and his aunt as they stop off in a fictional European city while travelling home.  The film is a strange mixture of slowness and intensity.  It opens with the three of them laying half-asleep in a train car, sweat trickling down their brows as they lol in the carriage.  Suddenly the aunt coughs up blood.  This is the film in a nutshell: nothing happens, and then something alarming happens.

The nature of the relationship between the mother and the aunt is left tantalizingly ambiguous.  Although the aunt is sick, she has a domineering, possessive attitude towards the mother.  Is this some latent lesbianism?  Some prudish guard over the mother's affairs?  At one point they seem to be on the verge of kissing, but in another moment the mother accuses the aunt of interrogating her, grilling her for information about a date she went on.  Where does the aunt get her sense of entitlement to the mother?  Is it familial or romantic or (god help us) perhaps both?

To add to the confusion between the aunt and the mother, the aunt is a translator.  At one point the boy's mother says "Isn't it wonderful that we can't understand each other?"  There's a theme of communication vs a sort of ambiguous non-communication.  The supporting cast all speak a made-up nonsense language invented for the film.  There seems to be a tension between a sort of conquering and categorization that the aunt is engaged with vs the mute feminine mystique of the mother.  The mother never explains herself, and we are not usually allowed to see what she's up to.

To add even more to the confusion, most of the film is shot from the boy's perspective.  We see tanks passing by the train windows in the opening scenes, but they are clearly toy tanks.  We follow the bored child as he runs around the hallways of the hotel they're staying in.  We watch him laboriously draw a picture.  Is any of this in his head?  Is this young boy fantasizing about his mother and aunt?  It is confusing.

Mostly however it is slow.  There are shots of boobies and a few sex scenes which raised eyebrows in the 60s but which is nothing too shocking by today's standards (still though, it might be awkward to watch with your parents) however, like Last Year In Marienbad, most of the film feels slow and boring and stuffy.  I watched it right after lunch and perhaps fell into a food coma, but really.  The film is 90 minutes long but it feels much longer.  Maybe my attention span is just shot?

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

Saw Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), a fantasy comedy film about a band of adventurers who are trying to pull off a heist to steal the treasure in this lord's castle.  It's based in the DnD universe/set of rules and feels very DnD-ish.  Everyone gets their little moment to shine and there's episodic dungeons and looting and leveling up and all.  Tremendous fun!

I don't really have any deep thoughts about this film.  It was a lot of dumb fun.  The world it lives in is very simple and straightforward.  It's sometimes ambiguous what characters' true intentions are, but only in the aid of big reveals.  All the baddies are pretty obviously bad and the goodies are pretty straightforwardly good.  It's simple but also fun.  I enjoyed it.