Maybe a Dirty Dozen is 14 the way a Baker’s Dozen is 13
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I just watched the Sony-Produced AppleTV+ exclusive Greyhound. written and starring Tom Hanks as a 55 year old warship captain in 1942. We all know those 55 year old warship captains. It was a lot of strange details that just raise questions. Why is he a 55 and this is his first command? Why is he a fucking U-Boat fighting tactical genius as well? He doesn’t eat or sleep for the 2 week Atlantic voyage and this is not a cause to relieve him of duty?
It’s America’s Dad Tom Hanks!
I should back up a bit. The film is his warship Greyhound escorting a convoy across the Atlantic. They are undergunned and under supplied giving desperately needed supplies to Britain. I can place it with The Key and Das Boot. Watching all these war movies builds a neat Expanded Universe of HISTORY.
Tom Hanks is absolutely the only character in the film and the most interesting part of the film is how he is a living computer shouting orders and processing information (how a guy that reached his 50s and this is his first command is this good is ???). That stuff is great. You pair it with how he is clearly losing his mind from fatigue as the film goes on (in a really great performance of what fatigue really looks like thanks America’s Dad.) But like no one else is a character so no one else has agency like clearly take fucking command from the dude that is losing his mind from exhaustion.
Maybe there is a 2 hour cut of this film but there are several baffling scenes of fades to black or really mistimed music cue late in the film. Also the opening and closing are really not needed. You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and it doesn’t and wow that ending was really long for 91 minute film about how tense it is to be in the ocean.
And the ocean stuff is great. There are some obviously CG shots but you get a feeling for being on that boat.
Would have been a fine afternoon in a movie theater not on my couch on my iphone SE.
I give it 2 Master and Commander On The Far Side Of The World (Best Film) out of 5.
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I watched Orson Welles’ The Stranger. I’m sad that I’m getting close to the point where there is no new-to-me Orson Welles left. Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to get recut and recovered films from him every ten years or so.
The movie is great pulp material. A Nazi, played by Orson, is attempting to hide in the heart of America by marrying the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice. However, a UN war crimes inveestigator, played by Edward Robinson, is onto him. There are many great moments where the two characters battle each other without letting others on. Orson was a Shakespeare obsessive and his predilection for cunning and deceitful characters plays out wonderfully here. And I’ve gotta say, I love the mustache.
I have so many thoughts about Orson but it’s hard for me to put them all together. It just seems like his life was as big as the characters he directed.
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The Stranger gets a little goofy but I love it. I’ve been putting off watching The Other Side of the Wind because what if I don’t like it? Maybe I’ll watch that tonight though. Love me some Orson.
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The tone of The Stranger varies quite a bit and I think that was purposeful. It works to convey that there is an ugly reality to the world that middle-class Americans are usually shielded from. The drug store feels like this haven of innocence. It would have been the perfect place for Franz Kindler to hide because no one there is capable of suspecting someone of shoplifting, to say nothing of murder. I was really startled to see documentary footage of concentration camps in this story, but I think it’s important that it was included.
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Watched The Other Side of the Wind last night and thought it was fucking great. Not always immediately enjoyable and certainly not always pleasant but wow, he still had it. I tried to watch it without consciously dwelling on the context of it being Orson Welles’ legendary lost film. That was fool’s errand however as I kept thinking to myself, “This is what the creator of Citizen Kane would make after a DMT trip.” Will have to watch again to let it fully soak into my brain.
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I still need to watch it myself. I’ve kept the Orson ball rolling with the “comprehensive” version of Mr. Arkadin. It feels like a bridge to the Cahiers directors’ early works. It distorts its pulpy genre trappings to try and express something complex. There’s something to be written about Orson’s political concerns against fascism in its many guises. Often, critics reduce his themes of megalomania to self-indulgence but it’s apparent that he was looking outward.
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Maybe that’ll be my next one. I started watching whatever version I was able to find years ago and got sidetracked. Also a big fan of what interviews there are of him out there. I like this one after a screening of The Trial in particular, nice vibe despite the technical difficulties.
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You’ve seen F for Fake, right? Great one for just hearing him talk. Brilliantly constructed, too.
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Yeah! I still haven’t seen The Magnificent Ambersons though. That and Mr. Arkadin are my last blind spots I think? Enjoyed watching Chimes at Midnight last year. And I’m due for a Touch of Evil rewatch.
Ambersons is so butchered it can be hard to watch all the way through. Occasionally, you’ll see a stretch where everything is perfect and it can be worth watching for those moments alone.
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Husbands is aggressively unappealing but also notable for postulating a “Greek” archetype that exists somehow in the liminal space between Italian and Jewish diaspora, much like the third ending to Mass Effect 3
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also I’m currently watching a Mass Mikkelsen movie from Cannes this year the premise of which is basically “resolve a midlife crisis by cleverly becoming an alcoholic” and it’s both a) incredibly Scandinavian b) the most ridiculously canned three act structure imaginable, like a sub-twitter thought experiment stretched over 2 hours
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contrary to popular belief, Ben Gazzara would try to ally with the Reapers while Peter Falk would be determined to fight them
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Just finished watching Mother! for the first time. Fuck. Yeah, not subtle, it hits one over the head but…it sure hit. Pulpified my upper body, reached my heart and didn’t stop there. The world is an open wound right now, so what’s a little more salt? Poetic salt! A fine piece of work, blunt instrument that it is. I guess some people don’t appreciate the heavy-handedness of the “message”. Replace An Inconvenient Truth with this one I say. Nah, people are people, we’re screwed (maybe (probably (ugh))), but the primal scream approach worked for me. Also gave me another excuse to muse about demiurgical gnosticisms. Javier Bardem triggered some flashbacks to John Huston’s mad patriarch in The Other Side of the Wind as well. Someone in that film says something to the effect that “No machine can produce more than it consumes” and being in a somewhat stoned state watching that film last night it rattled around my brain for a while. And now again. Plink plonk plonk.
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I’m convinced that Aronofsky’s middle name is Aaron but I cannot find any evidence of this.
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Mr. Arkadin is kind of a curiosity because of all the different versions/there being no definitive version. it’s really a testament to how difficult it was for Welles to cobble together money for a film after his early days, especially in that period. also i remember really liking The Lady From Shanghai if you’ve never seen that one. and The Trial is good too.
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I was delighted years ago to find, in a supermarket, a cheap 2-in-1 DVD of The Trial and Rutger Hauer’s Escape from Sobibor. This was before The Trial was as easy to find as it is now. Love it. It’s been ages since I’ve seen The Lady From Shanghai, maybe on like TCM when I was a kid, maybe I’ll do a Touch of Evil double feature with that one.
What struck me about some of the criticisms of Mother! was that people thought it could have been subtler in its message but didn’t mention that it has several simultaneous themes/messages. I couldn’t help thinking that the critic might have missed one or more of them. A lot of the cleverness is in presenting them all at once.
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Yes. Maybe my saying heavy-handed is not the best…or at least, the hand has many fingers and only one is pointed outward with the others clenched and left for those who care to ruminate about them (how’s that for a terrible metaphor).
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