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Bates Motel S05E04
I think this was probably the best ep. of the Season so far: Norman getting somewhere with Madeline Loomis and having mother terrifyingly invade that made his basic predicament seem horrific but strangely intelligible - like he's living in his own private De Palma movie! Some of this story-strand felt a little overwritten, like Madeline being thrilled by Mother's clothes and then forgetting that that's what she's wearing on their date. Haw Haw. And Madeline seeming to have pulled herself back from the brink with her husband then immediately going into cheat mode felt odd. Her husband radiates being a 'violent a__hole' type so last week's evident fear from her seemed right, but now I'm not so sure. Is the show setting her up to be more than meets the eye, i.e., as someone with her own mental problems up to and including multiple personalities herself? I assume not, but the alternative is 'bad characterizaton' right in the heart of the show's A-story, which otherwise is pretty strong.
The episode's B-story was the introduction of Sheriff Green, who splits the difference between Arbogast and Fargo (1996)'s Marge Gunderson, was also a winner. Lots of cribs from Psycho (1960) there, including a simple version of Hitch's famous 'Norman arches over to look at the registry while the camera looks up at his birdlike neck' shot. Good believable tension throughout their interactions. I didn't quite understand why the Sheriff gave Norman the car's plate #. Overwriting again? The detail *does* perhaps sell the idea that Norman might be sufficiently perturbed to panic about the car... but that's to say that a bit of plot-priming seemed to be showing (at the expense of Sheriff Green's plausibility - who keeps an eye out for number-plates?)
Alex Romero and Chick stories meandered on.
Overall, Norman/Mother is ready to blow. Even without Marion Crane showing up, he's got lots of targets and is himself a target for multiple others.
What did everyone else think?
[quote]Davis's light revulsion that Buono is her "leading man" was interesting: she must have realized that a character like Baby Jane wasn't going to do much better than this guy.[/quote]
I was actually a little puzzled by this...since, at least in the finished film Buono's character is *never* positioned as a leading man/romantic interest for Jane, instead he's a bit of a sad-sack chancer trying to scrape together a living, dogged by his mother (and physically is Bloch-novel Norman!), and forced by circumstances into trying to make some money off a crazy-woman. If Davis really did call for a recast with a William Holden/Ryan Gosling-type (movie-Norman!) then that whole side of the script would have to be reworked (and maybe we wouldn't believe that such a guy would ever be *so* short of options that he'd stick it out with a crazy-lady - Jane is *way* crazier and more delusional than Norma Desmond ever was!). Doesn't sound much like Davis to me.
In general, this sort of quibble is being taken up quite a bit in nymag's (excellent) coverage of the show. They're *into* it but aren't completely convinced yet that the show really understands WEHTBJ? itself that well. Matt Zoller Seitz over there, however, isn't impressed <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/tv-review-feud.html">at all</a>.
Theron's latest action-fest is directed by the half of the John Wick team that *didn't* come back for JW2. Here's the trailer:
<a href="https://youtu.be/8USk21Lt0f4">https://youtu.be/8USk21Lt0f4</a>
[quote]Nothing much else in 2005 got me in that "mainstream man" way[/quote]
Haneke's Caché (2005) is a must-see! So good.
[quote]King Kong the original is my favorite of 1933[/quote]
KK is probably most people's choice from 1933 (I think I've officially chosen 42nd St before but on a lot of days that's probably going to strike me as nuts!). Still what's most impressive about 1933 is its breadth of incredibly pleasurable films compared to previous years. Suddenly you've got Kong, you've got The Invisible Man, you've got probably the 3 best Busby Berkeley Musicals, you've got Stanwyck burning up the screen in Baby Face, you've got the best Marx brothers film Duck Soup, you've got Cukor doing a great, fluid Little Women (and Cukor's second for the year, Dinner At Eight, isn't bad either), you've got Rogers and Astaire together for the first time in Flying Down To Rio, you've got peak, free-love Lubitsch with Design For Living, you've got the first draft of Kane-style complex narratives in The Power and The Glory, and so on. The whole year in other words feels pregnant with the future of the industry, and at least 20 films can still be watched with great pleasure.
Why should 1933 feel like a watershed? I think the deep reason is that the transition to sound had been difficult technically, and for a few years in the early '30s sound was present but often pretty bad, dialogue was unnatural (and Hollywood frantically brought in people from Broadway to try to address the problem), acting styles were evolving but still uncertain, and cameras that had gotten very mobile by the end of the silent cinema mostly had been much more locked down for a number of years (to allow recording of sound that mostly couldn't be used anyway!). 1933 is the first year when almost everything out of Hollywood is looking better, sounding better, just kind of gelling; the new medium's finally locked and people are back to making the best movies they can, telling the most entertaining stories, and so on. America and the World might be in the middle of a Depression, but Hollywood is now starting to boom.
As for my 'Wright's list' project, I'm continuing to work my way through the final 70 or so. Here are the only ones I've seen post-IMDb (in order, together with rough scores)
The Doom Generation (1995) 3/10
Cop Car (2015) 6/10
Road To Morocco (1942) 3/10
Cheap Thrills (2013) 6/10
Roaring Twenties (1939) 9/10
Bitter Harvest (1963) 5/10
Sadly I may not have have energy or detailed enough memory to write capsule reviews for these now. Particularly when I really *don't* like something I start to forget about it almost immediately unless I write something down, and without the prompt of that IMDb thread I haven't been except for these scores.
OK, the latest word from Jim (over in General Discussion) is that it's going to take another couple of days to do the programming required to merge all of the relevant data... We all have to be patient, but holding hands with the IMDb past is coming (along with a whole bunch of other upgrades apparently).
[rec] (2007) is a brilliant found footage horror. I agree that most of the time FF is a gimmick and poorly thought through, but the odd, very well-planned story told that way can dazzle.
Feud - Episode 2
The cold open to this ep. was dynamite (esp. if you know how WEHTBJ? turned out): Crawford and Davis make common cause against Aldrich's casting of a too-vivacious-young-blonde as the next-door-neighbor. C&D not only crush the girl's dreams without a second thought, they show Aldrich and the crew who's boss and that they know who's boss.
All the best scenes that follow build from this cold open as C&D and A struggle for control and we see each of them treat their spouses or children almost as poorly as the original starlet-wannabe gal. This basic spine for the episode was very strong and reminded a lot of Mad Men (Kiernan Shipka is an explicit overlap, but Alfred Molina's Aldrich *feels* like a missing Mad Men character: he looks quite a lot like Harry Crane who became Stirling Cooper Draper Pryce's media guy - and spiritually Aldrich just is Harry Crane with a lot more talent who becomes the true in-house TV ad director that Harry Crane didn't become and that SCDP never had and who then skipped out to do movies.)
As with last week, I could do without the some of the padding with Kathy Bates as Joan Blondel looking back on the Joan and Bette phenomenon from the perspective of 1978, including some unconvincing reconstructions of 1940s films from both Davis and Crawford. And some of the Hedda Hooper stuff could and probably should have been left on the cutting room floor. One starts to suspect that there's a dynamite 4 part-series struggling to get out from within this baggy 8-parter.
The episode landed a big punch from Jack Warner, who was strangely lukewarm about the project in ep. 1, but who in this ep. after seeing dailies knows he's lucked into to something good (but would he have that much pull with Director Aldrich just as the distributor?): 'Let's face it, after Psycho, horror's the future and we got it.'
Sarandon's Davis got the one-liner of the week: [pestered by a reporter as she arrives at the set] "What's your name?" "Sylvia." "Fuck off, Sylvia."
Molina, Sarandon, Lange and Tucci as Warner are all great. This is an Oscar-bait movie level cast so that even with its slight bagginess Feud remains must-see TV, a real communal watching event I'd say. What did everyone else think?
1992 had a bunch of at-at-least-very good films that functioned in part as black comedies: Glengarry Glen Ross and The Player principally, but also Man Bites Dog, and Dead Alive for complete carnage black humor. Looking back it was not only a very macho year with all this stuff + Unforgiven and Reservoir Dogs and One False Move, it also had quite a few moving dramas from Crying Game to Last of the Mohicans to A River Runs Through it to Husbands and Wives to (even though it's not my sort of thing) A Few Good Men, plus a couple of good R-rated genre near-blockbusters, Basic Instinct and Coppola's Dracula. Plus there were quite a range of good indies and foreign films from Bad Lieutenant and The Waterdance and Bob Roberts to a couple of Bergman scripts filmed by others (Sunday's Children, The Best Intentions) to Hard Boiled really announcing that John Woo was ready to come to Hollywood now please, to Romper Stomper and delicate French heartbreaker, L'Coeur en hiver, and so on. It was one of those years when there were good films around for almost all tastes.
1992, like 1997 and 2007, seemed pretty good at the time but has grown in stature as a movie year since as people have caught up with all the good movies from the year that they *didn't* see at the time.
Thanks for tolerating my grinchiness/snobbiness about MCV, ecarle... I do agree that comedy is very personal and perhaps especially comedy that's got a relaxed, performance driven quality (and that's neither manic nor ideas-driven).
I think I find MCV a lot more uneven in tone and character and basic scripting than you do (see examples below), but it's a good bet that I'm only bugged by this stuff because I'm somehow (perhaps as function of my mood when I saw it) immune to some of the film's basics charms. Compare with Guarding Tess: I really enjoyed it when I got around to seeing it last year for the first time... but I'm absolutely certain that the fact that I just find MacLaine and Cage enormously appealing and great together is the reason (hell I could go for a Guarding Tess 2 right now - or a thinly disguised variant of the premise with Cage as MacLaine's bodyguard... and I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone and that that picture would make money on concept alone). If MacLaine and Cage aren't amusing to you then the picture's not for you end of story.
Anyhow, you evidently liked Fred Gwynne's character a lot, but I actually found the characterization very uncertain. He's originally set up not just as prim and proper judge but as what in westerns used to be called a 'Hanging Judge', he's utterly shameless about favoring the prosecution and hindering the defence team.
Similarly, the Police are shown to be extracting utterly-tendentious confessions in malevolent ways. (All of that stuff would have to be recorded these days and would be found out, but historically bogus confessions extracted from confused people without lawyers and under extreme pressure has been a huge problem - it's no laughing matter really). That whole side of the prosecution was awful but kind of played for laughs: the boys are so jumpy that they not only mistakenly confess or near-confess, they mistake Vinny for a gay-panic-provoking cell-mate. These jokers. Not funny to me.
Anyhow, when later all the witness testimony turns out to be 'from a distance' (so much so that the positive identifications of the defendants in lineups from close up, etc. were deceptive, probably coached by the prosecution), well, the prosecution really has no positive argument, which only makes the whole 'hanging judge', 'this is open and shut', initial impetus seem even more sinister. We're supposed to believe, for example, that if the boys *hadn't* had access to their own lawyer and only had the public defender appointed to them then they were actual goners. Hilarious not.
But somehow we're supposed to just forget about all this at the happy-clappy ending when Vinny w/ Lisa's help not only establishes reasonable doubt for the Boys but also identifies the real bad guys beyond a reasonable doubt. And gets his gal.
BTW, looking up what other middle-of-the-road comedies were around in 1992, I noticed Wayne's World and A League of Their Own w/ Geena Davis and Tom Hanks and Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell doing women's baseball in WW2. I saw both of those at the time and quite enjoyed them both. I'd need to rewatch to be sure but I think that both are just a little more fun for me than MCV. I'd take MCV over Scent of A Woman though!
According to Jim, the founder of/programmer behind moviechats.org the next 24 hours will see moviechats.org import the close-to-full IMDb archive contents that filmboards.com et al. have been featuring for the last week or two. There may be a few service interruptions while this big upload happens. Since Psycho never got the benefit of Jim's initial once-over-lightly archiving, the change to having all the old IMDb threads present at once here will probably feel especially dramatic.
I didn't see My Cousin Vinny until much later on TV, and I guess my overall feeling about the film interfered with my ability to appreciate Tomei's character: I actually found it hard to believe when I saw it that MCV came out in 1992 since it felt like such a lazy '80s formula fish-out-water comedy (with a bit of formula emotional uplift at the end) to me. It had no zip to it, and it's a car-crash of NYC stereotypes meeting Alabama stereotypes, and it just didn't strike me as especially funny at any point.
Tomei was good-to-very-good but the material was pretty blah really in my view (Groundhog Day, Clerks, Dazed and Confused were from around this time for comparison). Also it struck me that Tomei's was a lead role, so that whatever she was doing was strictly incomparable to what someone like Judy Davis did in a true supporting role. Tomei is a constant pleasant presence throughout the film and she has *the* conventional female lead, 'reform-him-and-marry-him' character arc. It becomes impossible, I think, for Oscar Voters to vote for a true supporting actors handful of scenes against someone who's in most scenes in the movie and that you get to know, see change, etc.. Quantity overwhelms...
@thethingy23. Agreed, the decision to essentially ignore one of the few great, verified speeches by any pre-19C leader, one that's rated especially highly by Feminist historians, in favor of vaguely Lord-of-the-Ringsy mumbo-jumbo is unfathomable. It's hard to believe that screenwriter William Nicholson would have sanctioned this. I conjecture that this must have either been a brainless director-driven, on-set rewrite or the result of a studio-enforced note from producers to make the speech more 'St Crispins Day-like' or even more like some of the Iraq war-rhetoric of the time. I'd further bet that Blanchett wasn't amused; she doubtless would have been attracted by the authentically Shakespearean aspects of Elizabeth I's original speech.
Bates Motel S05E03
This ep. tried my patience. 1) I realize that I'm not really *that* interested in the question of how Norman/Norma intricacies can work for Chick. I guess one interesting feature of Chick is that he reminds us of the semi-insane, semi-enslaved Renfield-figure in Dracula-tales thereby pushing the Psycho mythos closer to a prior conception of horror (that the original film only flirted with doing). 2) I realize that the tale of Norma's ex-lover Alex's overcoming obstacles to get back to Bates Motel doesn't really interest me either (presumably I'd be a lot more interested if I'd watched Seasons 1-4).
Both the Caleb in the basement story (and his having some Norman-like qualities) and the growing attachment to Madeline Loomis story were good, however, so the ep. wasn't a bust by any means.... but I could do without all the padding.
@klownz. Yes, you're right. Online reality is shimmering these days: Beneath the Planet of IMDb.
That site along with an identical one at filmboards.com have disappeared. And Oceania (and with it Airstrip One) has always been at war with Eastasia.
Update: And they're back. Online reality is shimmering these days: Beneath the Planet of IMDb.
OK, have just watched Feud ep. 1 and rewatched WEHTBJ?... I enjoyed F quite a lot - the business backstory to WEHTBJ? is interesting and interestingly parallel to Psycho's. I would have guessed that Psycho's success would have made getting studio money for WEHTBJ? a breeze.... but, no, Aldrich ends up having to pay for a lot of the movie himself just the way Hitch did for Psycho, all the while having to give Jack Warner huge first dibs on the gross just to secure distribution!
It was fun to see Alison Wright (so good on The Americans) as Aldrich's assistant and fun to see Mad Men's Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka) show up as Bette Davis's daughter. Quality TV spreads! although it'll be a miracle if Feud hits Mad Men or The Americans heights for Wright and Shipka or for anyone else.
One thing that seeing WEHTBJ? again makes clear is that F stacks the deck in favor a particular sort of contrast between Crawford and Davis - Lange looks older and less beautiful than Crawford did in 1962 and Sarandon is taller, skinnier, probably flat out prettier and younger-looking than Davis was in 1962. The effect is that Feud's Davis feels even more relatively powerful than I believe Davis was and Feud's Crawford feels more beaten down by her fate than I tend to believe that Crawford actually was.
I agree with ecarle above that WEHTBJ? is a step down in quality from Psycho or Sunset Blvd or even from Aldrich's own Kiss Me Deadly (and also his great '70s trio: Emperor of the North Pole, Longest Yard, Ulzana's Raid). But it's still pretty great thanks to both Davis's and Crawford's performances and solid work from Aldrich throughout. The moment when Jane lets loose on Blanche still shocks - and the meta-level of Davis kicking Crawford in the head was appropriately gleefully anticipated in F ep. 1! - and this perhaps makes the murder even more disappointing. Aldrich's nerve failed him there. He could/should have had an Arbogast/gore moment but doesn't. Or even if we didn't see anything more gory than we did, if we saw Jane take a *couple* of swings to finish the maid off with appropriate skull-crunching - egg-shell-cracking a la Alien trailer years later? - sound fx each time that death could have been truly awful and memorable. And of course the score throughout WEHTBJ? is a disappointment, and never more so than in the murder scene (Psycho being the gold standard on these fronts).
[quote]On this "hag" thing. Its a shorthand I've read elsewhere again and again, and I will likely use it again, but it certainly does reflect a contempt for the 50+ actress in Hollywood, doesn't it?[/quote]
I remember the term 'hag-core' taking off in the '90s as an offshoot of -core being applied promiscuously to different music scenes in that period. Before then I think that the customary slang to refer to WEHTBJ? and the like was 'Psycho-biddy' flicks. This gentler-seeming term is the one that's used on WEHTBJ?'s wiki page.
[quote]Still, in 1962, the forties and fifties were tough ages for actresses. 60 on? Grandmother roles.[/quote]
Compare with Isabelle Huppert who's 63 and is Oscar nom'd for her role in Elle where she's an unbowed rape victim, is seen in all sorts of weird, consensual S&M sexual situations with men 20+ years her junior (and no eyelids are batted), and runs a software company that specializes in first person shooters fused with Japanese-style tentacle porn. Obviously your Hupperts's and Sarandons and Mirrens are exceptional figures, but pretty clearly no more exceptional talent-wise than Davis, Stanwyck, and co who really did get pastured out to Grandma-ville after 50. Progress!
p.s. I'm watching ep. 1 of Feud right now. Am enjoying it. (So far at least) Could do without the framing story w/ De Havilland and Blondell.
[quote]Oscar winner Judy Davis(didn't she eventually win, or am I wrong?)[/quote]
Davis hasn't won; she's been nom'd twice, for Passage To India and for Husbands and Wives (great, unconfortable-to-watch film - Woody's best of the '90s? - in which she was *amazing*). In the latter case she was robbed by Marisa Tomei's controversial win for My Cousin Vinny (which did nothing for me).
[quote]One realizes that directors like Hitchcock and Aldrich had to "see the movie in their mind" and galvanize their actors to believe in it, too.[/quote]Absolutely. Moreover if as an actor you mainly just want to be in very good movies then while the script is a reasonable indicator of how things turn out, at least equally important is if the Director can convince you that she knows what she's doing, what film she's making and that it rocks. Does she really see the movie in her head so that she can enthusiastically and with lots of detail pitch it to you over dinner and drinks?
I was rewatching the very entertaining Alien-making-of dvd extras the other day, and two relevant points jumped out.
1. Ridley Scott accepted the directing job then went away for 3.5 weeks and storyboarded the whole film that he saw from the script. His storyboards are *amazing* and 20th Century Fox instantly doubled his budget.
2. John Hurt was a late replacement for Frenzy's Jon Finch (Finch fell seriously ill on a Friday afternoon near the beginning of production, and a replacement had to be found over the weekend). Hurt didn't have a chance to read the script, instead he agreed to report for work Monday Morning just on the strength of Scott's enthusiastic multi-hour pitch of the film to him over a long dinner on Saturday. Good decision.