General Della Rovere

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A con man is made to impersonate a hero and finds his conscience

CoyoteRambles, Mr. Otter and I met for the Saturday Zoom Movie, and it was Mr. Otter’s choice…he had been leaning heavily toward Italian postwar cinema, and this was no exception.

The plot is standard but well done: bad guy con man makes himself the go-between communicating with the Germans running the town on one side and the families of the Gestapo’s captives on the other, taking his own cut of whatever bribes and payments are passed back and forth. Then the Gestapo makes him pretend to be the shining light of the Resistance, Della Rovere, and go to prison with other freedom fighters, hoping to get information from them.

This was good, but pretty talky for a war/betrayal/resistance movie.

Love Before Breakfast

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From the short story Spinster Dinner by Faith Baldwin

Carole Lombard is pursued/stalked by a rich guy who buys her fiance’s company and sends him to Japan and his own girlfriend to Hawaii to clear the field for pursuing her…

And…that’s is literally all I can remember about this movie, except that it was pretty terrible. Much as I like Cesar Romero and Carole Lombard, just the fact that they had multiple people shuttling in and out working on the screenplay is a dead giveaway that there are major problems here.

Pass this one up unless you are a die-hard Lombard fan.

Hands Across the Table

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Two penniless gold diggers agree to help each other in pursuit of marrying someone rich, but fall for each other instead.

Aaaaand…that’s pretty much the whole movie. There’s more detail, of course, but it’s not so outstanding that that matters.

This was okay. William Powell and Carole Lombard were both good, and the storyline wasn’t awful, just not very memorable.

We’re Not Dressing

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A bunch of wealthy socialites end up on a deserted island. Hijinks ensue!

This was pretty stupid, and Mr. Otter and I mocked it pretty much all the way through. The socialites are helpless and useless, spurning the lowly sailor’s (Bing Crosby) offers to show them how to do stuff, until it becomes apparent that they literally can do nothing for themselves, and give in. The girl who owned the sunken yacht falls in love with him, and they are eventually rescued.

The only bright spot in this incredibly dumb-but-not-in-a-good-way movie was the presence of George Burns and Gracie Allen as a couple of anthropologists on the other side of the island…they were, as usual, really funny. The rest of it? sink it without a trace.

Man of the World

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William Powell is using a scandal sheet to blackmail men to pay him to keep stories about them unpublished…his schemes go awry when he meets Carole Lombard and promises to go straight…but of course it’s not that easy…

This was one of a boxed set of five Carole Lombard movies that Mr. Otter and I watched one week…this one was pretty good, although William Powell was less charming and more scummy than usual.

Not bad, but not memorable.

The Tomorrow War

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Aliens will kill most of Earth’s population in the future so soldiers are being drafted in the present and sent to the future to fight and die…until Chris Pratt takes care of business.

OMG. This is the reason that, as much as I love time travel movies, they really should be kept out of the hands of idiots. This movie had a lot of boom and whango, as we say Chez Otter, but very little about it made sense. There were so many plot holes related to time travel that I’m not even going to go there. Mr. Otter and I spent most of the movie yelling, Why are you doing this? at the screen, and pointing out the obvious paradoxes and inconsistencies.

And I really like Chris Pratt, but not here. Even he couldn’t save this dog.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

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Eddie Brock, the host of the symbiotic alien Venom, is trying to get his journalism career back and interviews a serial killer…who becomes the host for another Venom-class symbiote, and is out to get his super-powered lost girlfriend out of the slammer.

I really liked the first Venom movie with Tom Hardy, and had been looking forward to the next in the franchise…but of course 2020. So when it actually did get released, I was on the road with my friend Craiggers, driving halfway across the US. We were in Albuquerque, and had a free evening, so we went to see this.

And it was…okay. Way too much ‘this symbiote is now inhabiting this body’ for me, even for a comic book story that was kind of silly. Much less character development than the first one. But okay.

The teaser has Eddie Brock and Venom transported to a hotel room in the Spider-Man universe, so we’ll see what happens there…

Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe

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Joe Jr. drops out of medical school because he wants to go into show business, so Joe Sr. lets him run his nightclub for a while, and gets a girl to pretend she’s interested in him to keep Jr away from Sr’s girlfriend. Shenanigans! And lots of musical numbers.

Completely ordinary, great if you like the aforementioned musical numbers. Lots of good singers and dancers to watch.

The Green Knight

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A retelling of the Arthurian legend, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The huge and scary Green Knight comes to Christmas in Camelot, and offers a challenge: any knight can strike him a blow with the knight’s sword, but a year later he gets to reciprocate. Gawain takes the challenge, cuts the Green Knight’s head off, and a year later has to travel to his castle to be beheaded, but ends up proving his bravery.

Which is a famous story that has been told over and over for hundreds of years, and is a great basis for a movie. Just not this movie.

Because the story is not very long, so the filmmakers had to add stuff to pad it out. And boy, did they ever. Including a lot of pseudomystical hoohah and looooong travel shots and things that made us say, Huh? (I saw it with Mr. Otter.)

This was long, not interesting, slow moving, and really really dull.

CoyoteRambles, whose specialty is cinematography, and who is a dear movie buddy, disagrees with us; he thinks it was engaging, interesting and beautifully made.

One out of three, CR, one out of three…

The Suicide Squad (2021)

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A reboot of the DC Comics bad-guys squad, they are sent to the island of Corto Maltese to stop evil scientists from what? Oh yeah, TAKING OVER THE WORLD.

I liked the 2016 Suicide Squad movie (Margot Robbie and Viola Davis are, I think, the only two holdovers from that. There are a few other characters who are the same…but there are a lot of new ones, or remakes of the old ones: Idris Elba’s Bloodsport vs Will Smith’s Deadshot, King Shark instead of Killer Croc, you get the picture.) and was really looking forward to seeing a sequel…except this isn’t, it’s kind of a reboot; the same thing has happened, with evil boss Viola Davis putting bombs in supervillains’ heads and telling them to get out there and do a job for her or she’ll kill them. That was the only similarity.

SPOILERS ahead, nothing huge, just fyi.

So this was a big ol’ mishmosh of a movie; the team is put together, they interact in very dysfunctional ways (they put the fun in dysfunction!) and then decide they need to GET IT DONE. Most of them are killed on landing, and then we find out that there’s a second team that was sent in to do the same job three days earlier, and the team from the beginning of the movie was just a distraction…but what’s distracting is the number of people with weird powers running around, killing whoever is a target, exchanging witty (or not) repartee, and maybe solving the problem?

This was just too full of stuff. If they had crammed any more plot or characters into this movie it would have exploded like one of its own special effects.