Reminiscence

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In a sort-of-apocalyptic future, a PI tries to uncover the truth about a client he falls in love with.

And let me say here that I really, really, REALLY wanted to like this movie. But no.

Firstly, it’s Bladerunner lite. Dark post-apocalyptic setting where most people come out at night? Check. Anti-hero detective tormented by his past as the main character? Check. Falls in love with the girl he’s going to have to arrest? Check. Big reveal in the denoument? check.

So yeah.

The pace was slow (especially for an action movie), many of the scenes were dark and muddy, and the ending was so ridiculous that I was rolling my eyes and shaking my head at the screen.

No need to even give you spoilers, just trust the Otter, don’t even bother with this dog. You don’t need it in your memories…

Rome, Open City

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Although Rome is classified as ‘open’, meaning that citizens are not in imminent danger of bombing and they can move about the city fairly freely, the Nazis are in everyone’s faces, there are curfews and rationing, and life is still hard. There are two couples in love and a priest who all become involved with a fugitive Resistance worker.

It was Saturday night, time for our Zoom Movie Group. Mr. Otter had chosen this one, and he, I and Coyote Rambles all settled down to watch it.

This is the first in Rosselini’s Neo-Realist Trilogy (Rome, Open City; Paisan; Germany Year Zero) and was made so soon after the collapse of the Fascist govenment in Italy that they had to use black-market film. It was a big success, so Rosselini went on to make the other two.

Because Rossellini used mostly non-actors, and because it was shot in a Rome that looks tired and war-worn, it has a realism that is fascinating. The story is good, but the setting and visuals are actually as interesting as the plot, showing as they do how people were actually living at the time.

A unique perspective on WWII in Italy, well worth watching.

The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse

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Another ‘psychologist who identifies with his study too well’ movie, Dr. Clitterhouse is so absorbed by his study of the criminal mind that he becomes one.

This was one of the movies on our New Year’s Day Moviefest (theme: John Huston, who wrote the screenplay.)

This was pretty good for a 1938 psychological melodrama; Edward G. Robinson chews scenery like the pro that he was, and you can’t go wrong with Serious Honey Humphrey Bogart.

Predictable (Crime Does Not Pay) but the twists and turns, and the struggle for control of the gang between Bogie and Robinson, are worth watching.

Thir13en Ghosts (2011)

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A remake of the 1960 Castle film of the same name (without the cutesy leet numerals)

This is recognizeably the same movie as the original: impoverished family inherits houseful of ghosts, moves in, ghosts are inimical, uh oh, family triumphs, bad guys Pay the Price.

The new screenplay ups the ante by 1. making the old haunted house a wierd glass construct with mazelike walls that move around, and have wierd glowing writing on them, and 2. turning said construct into a machine that will End The World if the evil plan succeeds.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same. The ghosts are scarier and more inventive, there’s a lot more blood and violence, and it’s not as well written as the older movie (and when it’s not as well written as a Castle film, well, that’s saying something right there…)

As silly as it is, the older one works better…but don’t take my word for it, have fun watching them yourselves!

Pursued

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Jeb is traumatized by having heard his whole family killed while he hid in a cupboard as a child; not only does he have flashbacks and psychological scars, but his adoptive family is pretty messed up as well…

CoyoteRambles, Mr. Otter and I were having our weekly Zoom movie, and it was my turn to pick. I vividly remembered seeing a Western starring (I thought) Robert Mitchum*, many years ago, and the final reveal in that movie was that he had a split personality and the bad guy he was pursuing/running away from was…HIMSELF.

And I’m damned if I could find it. I’m a librarian, folks, and I’m REALLY REALLY GOOD at finding things….but that movie that I saw at the small theater of the photography museum in Balboa Park in San Diego that time…just doesn’t seem to exist. This was the closest I could come up with, but it’s not what I reemembered.

Still, Pursued wasn’t bad at all. This is one of those psychologically interesting westerns from the heyday of the genre, when some of their creators said, “Let’s do something a little different this time!” And this one works pretty well. The flashbacks get a little melodramatic, and there’s lots of foreshadowing, but the big reveal at the end is good. Mitchum doesn’t have lunch on the scenery, and Teresa Wright is easy on the eye; you’ll see Judith Anderson and Alan Hale here as well, for you old folks who remember them.

A western worth watching!

*Recently promoted to Serious Honey as of 2022

The Wipers Times

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Three soldiers in the trenches in WWI France find a printing press and start a newspaper.

This was a pretty good movie for a docudrama; Mr. Otter and I were printers ourselves once upon a time, and we love anything to do with printing and writing. The story here is funny and poignant (WWI, obviously not a completely happy time) but the characters are good and the ups and downs make for a very enjoyable movie.

Michael Palin plays the General who is supportive of the project, as opposed to his underlings who are dead set against it. The rest of the actors were new to me, but all were good.

An interesting, and entertaining, look at WWI.

The Call of the Wild

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From the novel of the same name by Jack London

Buck the Dog goes from being a house pet to lead dog on a dog sled in Alaska during the Alaska Gold Rush at the turn of the last century.

If you are the one person on earth who doesn’t know how this ends, there is a SPOILER below. However, the dog DOES NOT DIE. That’s not a spoiler, it’s Otter’s Law of Animals in Movies. I don’t go see movies where the animal dies if I can avoid them.

I went to see this with my friend Dr. Turquoise; neither of us had high expectations, except for the certainty that the CGI dog would be awful, but it was a movie and what the heck.

She was pleasantly surprised to discover that our local emporium du movies had comfy recliner seats; I don’t know how long it’s been since she went to a movie theater…!

The book this movie is based on has been considered a childhood/YA classic for many years; it was London’s first big writing success, and has remained in print since publication. It’s one of those books everyone has heard of, whether or not they’ve read it. And to be honest, I think I read it back when I was a young Otter, but I couldn’t swear to it…probably time to download it to my Kindle.

Anyway. The story takes Buck from being the huge rambunctious family dog in Santa Clara County CA, through being kidnapped and sent to Alaska, where there was such a demand for dogs to pull sleds that this was a common thing on the West coast at the time. He runs into Harrison Ford a couple of times, then ends up with him in the wilderness, where he (the dog, not Ford) meets a pack of wolves and finally joins them.

But what about Buck, the main character/dog/CGI extravaganza?

He was actually damn realistic. I kept thinking, “that’s one well-trained dog…oh, right, it’s CGI”. Amazingly good.

Harrison Ford was also pretty good, and knew enough to NOT chew too much scenery and let the dog take center stage, so that was good.

What was NOT good was the villain. The city slicker (you can tell from his clothes) who does the stupidest things ever and yet DOES NOT DIE. He takes an overloaded team out into the wilderness with his two buddies, and even after Ford has cut Buck, the lead dog, free, the team goes (totally unbelieveable, a dog team ALWAYS has to have a lead dog to follow). After the sled crashes and the dogs “run off” (and his companions, one a woman, are never mentioned again) he manages to find his way back and cause  trouble again. And he does other completely unbelieveable stuff that just had me rolling my eyes, but I won’t give away the rest of the plot. So that’s the weakest part of this movie; otherwise, it was pretty good, and we enjoyed it.

A good kids’ movie that adults can watch without suffering.

City Beneath the Sea

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A city beneath the sea. Alien attacks. Irwin Allen. What more do you need to know?

We knew this would be cheesy going into it…Irwin Allen, for those of you who missed the 1970s, is synonymous with big (or low, in this case) budget disaster movies, his two most famous being The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. This…is not of that calibre.

This is a silly, low-budget, badly written filler of a movie. The sets are slightly futuristic but minimally so to keep them cheap; I was about to say they were on a par with low-budget tv series of the time, and looked on IMDB and found that this was indeed a made-for-tv movie. Nuf sed. The costumes lean towards jumpsuits for the men and tight miniskirts for the women, because the future will of course be like that. The writing is abysmal, about the level of a 1930s serial movie like Flash Gordon. This movie is only good to make fun of, which we did.

Otherwise, don’t waste your time on this dog.

 

Joker

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Instead of the origin story of a superhero, we get that of a supervillain, the eponymous Joker.

There has been a lot of controversy about this movie, which is basically about the rise of a crazed serial killer; those who oppose it say that this is another example of glorified violence. Personally, I think the movie made the Joker and his life look damn unattractive, but that’s just my opinion. I did think it was brilliant and that Joaquin Phoenix (who is a favorite actor Chez Otter) deserves a damn Oscar for this. He was that good.

And now I’m going to venture into SPOILERLAND, so if you don’t want to find out anything about what happens, stop here.

So wow. I had tried to see this for a month, even attempting to get to a movie theater while on vacation, and it just didn’t work out…then I suddenly found myself with an afternoon free (anomalous for me) and just went ahead and did it…and I’m so glad I did.

This is the slow descent into madness of a serial killer, and Phoenix brings out every nuance of crazy. He is believeable, sociopathic, and scary as hell. I can see why it got huge acclaim at the Venice and Cannes festivals; it’s not about capes or superpowers, it’s just about this one guy and watching him live his life.

The one thing that I found odd was his last interaction with the woman and child he’s fixated on…did he kill them? He just left their apartment, but nothing was shown…I found out later that all his interactions with her were imaginary, from meeting in the elevator onwards; this makes more sense than that she (especially being the mother of a young child) would have ANYTHING to do with him, but I somehow missed that that was going on.

Otherwise (and that was probably my mistake, not the writers’) it was well written, amazingly acted, and dark as hell.

If your taste runs to this sort of dark psychological drama thing, make sure you see it. If it doesn’t, here’s a nice kitty you can look at instead:

 

Macbeth (1961)

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From the play of the same name by William Shakespeare.

Aaah,  the Scottish Play. With the Scottish Sean Connery. Back when he was seriously young and not well known, a year before Dr. No.

This is one of those 60s television theater productions, with minimal scenery, stark lighting and very earnest actors…and you know, Sean isn’t half bad, although then as now he tended to run his words together almost unintelligibly. There was nobody else in the production that I had ever heard of, but they were all good, probably bright lights of the TV theater scene at the time.

This is a pretty well done production, and worth seeing. Although they don’t cut off Macbeth’s head in the end and parade around with it, for some reason, even though that’s a high point of the play…