The Madwoman of Chaillot

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From the play La Folle de Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux

A very old-fashioned countess takes on the destructive industrialists of the modern world with the help of various eccentric people.

I have loved this movie since I was a young Otter. I made time for it every time it came on TV (back in the days when the Television Gods ruled what you watched, and if it wasn’t scheduled to be on television, you couldn’t see it…) I had not watched in, maybe, 40 years (yes, this Otter is old.) but when I realized that it was on one of the streaming services, I chose it for our Saturday Night Zoom Movie group.

And…it was fun. I like Katherine Hepburn, and she was awesome as the Countess who does not approve of the modern world and is attempting to keep the businessmen from destroying the part of town she lives in in quest of oil lying below the streets. One of the businessmen is Serious Honey Yul Brynner (with hair!) There is more slapstick than I remembered, campy late 60s slapstick, but it was fun watching Hepburn and her coterie take on The Bad Guys and win.

A charming evening’s entertainment.

Orlando

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From the novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf

A young man is commanded by Elizabeth I never to grow old…and doesn’t.

My book group read this, and it was pretty good; I certainly liked it better than the only other Woolf book I had read to that time, To The Lighthouse. So I said to Mr. Otter, we both really liked the movie when it came out, let’s watch it again!

And we did…and it was still good. Not as stellar as I had remembered, but certainly enjoyable.

Orlando, given the gift of long life and youth, is on a self-narrated quest for poetry and love. The tale is told with humor, especially when he goes on a voyage and returns as a woman, having decided that that may be the reason he can’t find true love.

There are some nice observations about male and female roles (especially in the second half of the movie, which is much more enjoyable than the first because of Orlando’s comments about being female) and beautiful settings.

This is charming and interesting, and lightly amusing. A fun movie for an evening with someone you love!

Ziegfeld Follies

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William Powell plays Flo Ziegfeld, up in Heaven, thinking about the perfect show that he would put on if he were still on Earth.

I’m not joking. That’s what this whole movie is. The acts that Powell/Ziegfeld dreams of having perform in his theater while he looks down from Heaven and does introductions/commentary.

This movie is, of course, purely a vehicle for whatever Warner Brothers stars were available (or forced to perform, since it was the bad old days when they were under contract to the studio and had to do what they were told. It’s not a bad list- Lucille Ball (singing a serious song as a beautiful Ziegfeld Girl instead of the wacky funny woman we all know her as nowadays), Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and many more very talented people.

Pretty good for what it is, definitely a period piece.

12 Monkeys

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A convict from the future is sent to the past to try to find out what cause the plague that wiped out most of humanity, and stop it if possible.

I saw this once or twice in the mid-90s when it came out, and remembered it as brilliant-Bruce Willis, a very young Brad Pitt, Madeleine Stowe, and of course directed by Terry Gilliam. Seeing it again 20 years later, as a much older Otter…maybe not brilliant, but still very good.

This is one of those movies where you have to just accept several premises: that time travel works, that it is possible to change the past, and that huge coincidences are just part of life. On the other hand, given those three things, this movie has edge-of-your-seat suspense and really mind-blowing twists and turns. Even having seen it, albeit 20 years earlier, I was rivited by the plot and waiting to see how it would play out (I vaguely remembered the general plot but not the details.)

Bruce Willis is perfect for the desperate but clueless main character, and Brad Pitt as the crazy son of the virologist. Madeleine Stowe is excellent as always, as the psychiatrist assigned to Pitt’s case.

Just get on the roller coaster and ride. Everything will make sense by the time it’s over.

Citizen Kane

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The life of a rich and famous man told in flashbacks by a reporter who is trying to figure out the meaning of Kane’s last word: Rosebud.

So this movie came out in 1941, flopped, was hidden in the RKO vaults in embarrassment, and got boo’d at the Academy Awards for that year every time it won…nine times, that was. And yet it’s one of the most famous, studied, and talked about films of all time. It wasn’t until it was rereleased in the 1950s that people said, wait a minute, look at that camerawork! And history was made. Just goes to show how public opinion can change.

My experience of this movie is exactly the same: when I saw it as a young Otter, I thought it was kind of stupid. I didn’t know anything about cinematography or William Randolph Hearst or the times, and just didn’t get it.

Then on one of our Saturday Zoom movie nights, Mr. Otter, CoyoteRambles and I watched Mank, which was very good, and I said, if you guys don’t mind seeing Citizen Kane yet again, I would love to give it a rewatch when it’s my turn to pick. And so we did.

And like Americans of the 1950s and later, this time I got it.

It’s a good movie, a good story, Welles is awesome, and the cinematography, especially the camera angles and the light, is really amazing.

Small quibble: there is a librarian in this movie, and she’s a stereotypical dragonish book guardian who doesn’t want anyone touching her hoard…meh.

So much has been written about this movie and it’s so ingrained in our pop culture that I really don’t have much else to say about it…my readers (bless them) have probably seen it more times than I have.

But I’m glad to join the group of Kane supporters. Thanks for waiting, everyone.

Spartacus

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From the novel of the same name by Howard Fast

A slave leads an almost successful revolt against the Roman Empire.

I love this movie so much. It’s got a great story, spends a lot of time on the characters (which is kind of hard on the viewer, since this is one of those movies where just about everyone dies), and really lovely cinematogaphy (which is one of the four Oscars this movie won.). Three’s lots of Roman pomp and a pretty darn good scene with the Roman legions deploying for battle. There’s enough action to keep my explodo-loving brain happy, but enough character development to engage me as well.

Aaand…there are so many more things to talk about relating to this movie, I’m just going to hit the high points:

• As you can see, this is an Otter Family Favorite Movie. Both Mr. Otter and I have seen it many times and love it.
  
• The cast is amazing: Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and Tony Curtis, to name just a few. Not to mention being directed by Stanley Kubrick, who took over from the original director; evidently the first scene, in the mines, is all that remains of the footage Anhony Mann directed
  .
• Fun fact: the mine scenes in the beginning were shot in Ryan, a mining area near Dante’s View in Death Valley..
  
• This was the movie that finally ended the Hollywood Blacklist, when Kirk Douglas insisted on giving Dalton Trumbo credit for writing it (after being blacklisted, Trumbo had written a ton of movie screenplays, two of which had won Oscars, but all had been credited to pseudonyms)
  
• The book was excellent as well, but very differently structured from the movie. Howard Fast, himself a victim of the blacklist, wrote it while serving time in prison for contempt of Congress.
  
• There is a scene in the middle of the film that is pretty tame now but at the time was cut for being waaaay too suggestive; when the original version was restored, the film existed but not the soundtrack for that part. Tony Curtis rerecorded his lines, but Olivier was dead, so Anthony Perkins did a really fabulous job of putting his Olivier on.

If you haven’t seen this excellent classic movie, DO IT NOW. Trust the Otter, you won’t regret it.

Rosemary’s Baby

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From the novel of the same name by Ira Levin.

Rosemary and her husband move to a new apartment with eccentric neighbors. She gets pregnant. Then things start getting REALLY WIERD.

This is an iconic horror movie, directed by Rpman Polanski and starring John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow. I remembered having seen it as a young otter, but didn’t remember anything about it, so I was happy when we watched it on Saturday Movie Night, although I warned Mr. Otter and CoyoteRambles that if it got oogie, I’d leave.

And as wierd, atmospheric and creepy as it was, it was never oogie.

What it was, after hearing jokes about it (including an excellent Mad Magazine parody) for fifty years…was pretty damn good. The suspense builds, the neighbors start out a little odd and get stranger and stranger, her husband is reassuring but not helpful, and the web around here closes in as you watch and can’t do anything.

A classic that’s well worth revisiting.

Duck Soup

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Groucho ends up running a country. Wheee!

Who doesn’t love the Marx Brothers? Well, at least we Chez Otter do! CoyoteRambles was visiting, and movies are a big part of his visits, so we all decided on having some fun and watching this again.

It’s one of my fav Marx Bro movies; the ridiculousness of the plot (Groucho is made the leader of a fictional country that is on the brink of war with another country. You can guess how well that turns out…), the Hail Freedonia song (as well as Hurray for Captain Spaulding), the costumes and settings, the silliness of everything going on…this movie has it all!

Whether or not you have seen it before, or even if you have never seen the Marx Brothers at the top of their game, this is a great one to watch over and over and over…

2001: A Space Odyssey

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There is a book with this title by Arthur C. Clarke; he worked on it with Stanley Kubrick while the movie was being filmed, and the book was released after the movie came out with out.

Like I can describe this movie in one sentence. Okay, here goes: Human evolution as enhanced by wierd monoliths, from early man to space travel, and what happens to the first astronauts to go to Jupiter. Hm. Not perfect, but it’ll do.

I saw this movie when it was new, when I was a very young otter indeed, at the Hollywood Cinerama Dome, which has an 86 FOOT WIDE SCREEN. It was quite an experience, and I’ve never forgotten the wonder and coolness of that movie, and have seen it many times.

And yet, here it is 2020, and I had not reviewed it…which means that I have not seen it since January 1, 2002, which is when I started reviewing every movie I watch. Wow. That amazed me.

CoyoteRambles was visiting us, and as is our wont, after a good dinner we settled down with some delicious libations to watch a movie or two. This came up in the conversation, and since he had taught it in a class for foreign students, we decided to watch it; one of the best things about watching movies with CoyoteRambles is that he knows so much about movies.

And as I remembered, it was wonderful.

But…there are SPOILERS ahead.

If you are one of the few in the world who haven’t seen it yet, you may want to come back to this review after watching it. Go ahead, I’ve got some free time.

You back? Okay!

So yes, the cinematography is amazing. And beautiful in many ways. We found out from CR that the only reason the makeup artist DIDN’T win an Oscar for the first section, the apelike hominids, was because everyone thought they were really apes instead of people with amazing makeup…wow.

It’s fun, fifty years later, to see the concept of future tech.

On the one hand, video phone calls and recorded video messages. On the other hand, no handheld devices.

On the one hand, computers. On the other hand, mostly keypads or voice commands.

On the one hand, a regular shuttle flight to the space station, stewardess and all. On the other hand, palatial amounts of room and meal/drinks service…not really the travel experience of today for most people, plus for a trip like that economizing on space would be important.

Hindsight is so easy. But the internal logic of how all of it worked together was very consistent, and a joy to watch, either then or now…although seeing it as a 10 year old, the plot didn’t completely make sense to me until I read the book…but I was that kind of kid, ALWAYS read the book.

CoyoteRambles said he had had an epiphany about the movie, even after watching it umpteen times: at the end Kier Dullea finds a hidden recorded message about the government finding a monolith on the moon, realizing that it was sending a signal to Jupiter, and covering that up…and that ‘knowing’ that, having it in his memory but having to lie about it, was what drove HAL crazy. That was an interesting insight!

This is one of the truly great movies. If you haven’t seen it, do it now.

 

 

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

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From the book of the same title by Jules Verne.

A group of scientists trying to find out what has happened to a missing ship in the early 1800s finds a reclusive misanthrope who lives in a submarine and takes his revenge on the world by attacking merchant ships and military vessels.

This was one of my favorite books when I was a young otter, and I have to say that Disney cheesiness aside, it’s a heck of a movie. Mr. Otter has loved this movie since he first saw it in the theater, and showed it to me many years ago.

Kirk Douglas is the main character and comedy relief, as a harpooner who is invited to join Professor Aronnax’s expedition to find the missing ship; after they do come across Nemo, they realize they must stop him.

James Mason is wonderful as Nemo, as he on the one hand proudly shows off all his scientific innovations and on the other foams at the mouth when talking about the evils of modern society. Douglas is amusing and well cast, and Peter Lorre is the professor’s much-put-upon assistant. There is also a sea lion mascot, and a giant squid attack. Who could ask for more?

This is just fun to watch, no history or science brain needed.