Babylon (2022)

Saw Babylon, a film about showbiz in the wake of the talkies.  More broadly, it's about progress and how it impacts people.

The film follows four characters most closely: an up-and-coming Ingénue who has raw talent, a hard-working Servant who has hustle, and a suave Leading Man who has vision.  The film watches how they are impacted by arrival of the talkies: some are able to ride the wave, but not all.

The film is meant to be a comedy. It opens on a huge, swinging party which is a metaphor for the before-times.  The party really is great though: there's nude people cavorting about, midgets, costumes, and barnyard animals.  This is all shot in a continuous take, overwhelming the senses with an eternal swooping glide over the festivities.  I enjoyed all the glut and excess.  The gag I liked best was when the leading man is talking to someone and, unfocused and in the background, a cow shambles by.  Outrageous!

The film is frequently funny in an ironic kind of way, however (typical of me) I enjoyed it more when it was giving me pathos.  There's a late-film monologue where one character lectures another on the inevitability of irrelevance, of having outlived your usefulness, but there's another undercurrent that's never really spelled out: that this is a business.  Yes, there's talk of artistry and talent, but it's all marketing in the end.  It reminded me The Social Network, another film about vision being transmuted into cash.  This is all sort of metaphorically given to us in a sinister closing party that shows what was hiding beneath everything the whole time (also: phenomenal cameo from Tobey Maguire!)

Ossessione (1943)

Saw Ossessione, an Italian film based on a noir book.  Being a noir plot, you know there's gonna be murder most foul and femmes most fatale.  In addition to all of this, I thought the main character guy was pretty attractive, so that was nice.

The plot is that a drifter (the main character) comes to a small bar/gas station rest stop in rural Italy run by a husband/wife team.  The husband in much older and fatter than his wife, but he seems to love her. She is hard-working and stern.  The drifter immediately starts making eyes at the wife of the house who makes starts making eyes right back and quickly engineers a way to keep the drifter at her bar.  We now have a classic love triangle: the oblivious husband, the scheming wife, and the hot third party.

The film is pretty good.  It's shot in a naturalistic style with enough Hitchcockian heightened drama to keep it interesting.  There's another drifter character who urges the main character to move on, away from the wife's messy designs and to join the navy.  I read these scenes as being homoerotic because it amused me to do so.  The film is really most interested in watching this attractive drifter brood and be tormented.  He's pretty good at that though, so it's time well spent.

The film is more slow-paced and natural than most noirs, but its noir roots are where its heart is.  There's not a lot of fedoras or detectives, but dames get slapped and schemers scheme.  It surprised me a bit with the slower pacing, but it was interesting.  Sort of Maltese Falcon meets Call Me By Your Name.  It didn't shock me or blow me away (what does?) but it's a solid film.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

Saw Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a fun little film that follows Wallace and Gromit as they once again match wits with the villainous Feathers McGraw.  Also adding to the madness: Wallace has created a robot which is comically irritating.  The film is fairly fun, but contains a lot of in-jokes and references to older shorts and movies.  It's not important to know all the lore, but you'll understand the joke of having Wallace run into the farmer from Shaun the Sheep, for example.

Anyhow, the antagonist, Feathers McGraw comes from The Wrong Trousers which is my favorite Wallace and Gromit short.  It doesn't quite match that one's climactic chase sequence, but it delivers on the homey, goofy feel of the franchise.  It didn't quite meet my expectations, but in fairness my expectations were sky-high.

If you've seen the other Wallace & Gromit movies, you know what to expect.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Saw Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  It was a Sam Peckinpah movie about the death of Billy the Kid at the hands of Pat Garrett.  I didn't like it.  Filmed in the 70s, this is one of those movies that celebrates the daring individual against the encroaching forces of civilization and capitalism.  This is a fine theme and, unlike many other films of the time, it doesn't come at the expense of broader society or some hapless girlfriend.  The folks that Billy kills in order to be free, man, are usually maniacs or evil in their own right.  No, the thing that sets me off about this film is how tediously violent it is, how plodding and grim, how torturous and lame.

The plot is this: Pat Garrett is a retired outlaw become sheriff.  He's been hired or assigned or whatever to bring his old friend Billy the Kid to justice.  Pat has the outlaw chops but is clearly a sell-out.  He cavorts with prostitutes, commands hired men, and generally carries out his duties in a grim self-loathing way, hating what he's being forced to become in order to capture Billy.  Billy meanwhile smiles and smirks and dandles children on his knee, beloved by all, he kills only when he has to, being free and cool and all.  All the other characters are filthy, ugly, fat old men who lumber ponderously around the desert, murdering each other.  (Oddly Bob Dylan is given a prominent but minor role.)

In fairness to the film, I think I didn't really Get It.  It's not really for me, I think.  The violence is distasteful, but it's sort of Peckinpah's whole thing, and the theme of living free vs bowing to societal pressures is a theme I've seen before and have been irritated by before (most notably by Five Easy Pieces which I hated.)  I think I recognize the universe that this film takes place in as one that has no use for me; one in which I, personally, would be killed by.  If life were all just a cynical kill-or-be-killed, I think I'd just lay down and die.

Beauty and the Beast (1978)

Saw Beauty and the Beast, a Czech version of the famous story.  This one stays mostly true to the original story, lingering on the redemptive power of the love of a woman for a monster.  A little off-topic, but in its own way, the Beauty and the Beast story may be the first example of the Magical Pixie Dream Girl trope.  Anyway, this film is shot as a horror film, so it's fairly grim and strange.  The magical castle that Beauty stays in is dark and shadowy, overgrown with moss and  dirt everywhere.  It is inhabited by magical servants who are not singing teacups, but dark, gargoylish monsters.  The Beast himself is made up to look like a bird, his head covered in some unpleasant mixture of dirt and feathers.

The film succeeds in being creepy, but creepy in a sort of dark fantasy way.  You never really feel fear, but it would creep out a child, I feel.  There are strong elements of fairy-tale whimsy and simplicity in it however.  Beauty has two sisters who are nakedly greedy, literally stealing the dress of of Beauty at one point, always laughing and blatantly evil in a broad, fairy-tale kind of way.  Juxtaposed with this is Beauty's father, a struggling merchant trying to provide for his family.  His sincerely acted exhaustion grounds the story in some real-world anxiety and despair.

The film is a strange mix of cartoonish and realistic.  It's very gothic and sinister, particularly when Beauty is in the Beast's castle.  It's not scary, but it's very self-indulgent in this teenage, self-serious kind of way, almost campily so, as if Hellraiser had been a fantasy film.  It's an interesting take on the story.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Saw Mildred Pierce, a noir film that opens on a murder and then flashes back to tell the story of how we got here.  Mostly, the film is a fairly progressive film about Mildred, a working mother building a life for her children.  The film was shot in the war years, and the business that the mother builds up is a restaurant, but it's still a nice thing to see this woman make a successful career for herself.  Alas, she is forced into ever-more financial risk by her heinous daughter Veda.  Veda is the wanna-be aristocrat who has the misfortune of being born to a prole and whose disdain for her mother's work is the engine of most of the film.  Hilariously, she was almost played by Shirley Temple.

The film was alright.  There's a strong proto-feminist (perhaps even crypto-saphic!) undercurrent to the film which makes it feel fresher than other contemporaneous films.  The character of Mildred is studied closely.  It's an interesting meditation on who this character is, how she's driven to greatness, and what that greatness means to her.  It unfortunately also involves Butterfly McQueen (famous for not knowing about birthin' babies in Gone With the Wind) doing her maid role which is the stuff of racial caricature.  So this film delivers on strong women, but only strong white women (a trait shared by Gone With the Wind.)  We can't have everything.

Joan Crawford does a nice job of portraying Mildred.  She does her signature clench-jawed declaiming  of her lines and every one sounds great, but she feels strangely wimpy here.  I found myself thinking how she could have done it better, such is my vice.  Similarly, the other characters are stuck in the mannered style of 40s acting: they say their lines in a service-like way, then scuttle off, leaving the stage clear for the next scene.  It's a very formal way of acting.  Everyone is playing their role in a way that makes sure the background characters never protrude into the foreground, but it leaves some lines feeling strangely flat, like they're just lines being recited.

Anyway, this was an alright film.  Worth seeing for Crawford's scene-chewing and surprisingly progressive in parts.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Saw Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.  It was a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road.  That film I absolutely adored.  It was full of crazy, delightful, shocking excess.  This film is similar in that it's more of the same fun-house ride, but it's the same fun-house ride as before, so it feels a little less ground-breaking.  Don't get me wrong: this is not a bad film by any means, but it doesn't leave me with the same go-out-and-tell-everyone feeling the first film did.

The plot follows the story of Imperitor Furiosa before she joins Immortan Joe's gang.  Because this is a prequel, some of the conclusions are a little fore-gone.  Eg: we know she will wind up working for Immortan Joe.  The film keeps the action exciting enough that it sort of helps you to forget this, but we know always how the film will sort of wind up.  On that note: not to give spoilers, but the ending is pretty satisfying, a clever symbol of hope for tomorrow winning out over anger over the past.

I liked this film okay.  It wasn't as face-melting as the first film, but it's a solid showing.