Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)

The feeling that comes through most palpably watching Duck Soup in 2024 is the desperation of the vaudeville circuit from whence the Marx Brothers act hailed, the go-for-the-jugular imperative to do something, anything to stay on stage and curry the audience's favor. If the jokes are falling flat, then do a dance. If the dancing won't sustain, then sing a song. If the song is a dud, then do some acrobatics or a magic trick or try another joke. And above all, remember - sing out, Louise! You can see this process in the Vitaphone shorts, early sound films capturing vaudeville greats just as film sound technology was beginning to torpedo vaudeville as a national pastime. Check out the Foy Family in Chips of the Old Block (1928) where in less than eight minutes the famous Seven Foys (down one here although the act had already split up by this point, reuniting only for the film record) sing songs, wear goofy costumes, tell jokes, recite a gruesome fairy tale, perform pratfalls, and hoof it like the rent was due yesterday. And in typical vaudeville fashion, there's no glue holding the activities together; they simply present their trades in an array they hope will tantalize. One brother pretends to choke on his fake teeth and once the other brothers slap it out of him, oh now I guess they're dancing again.

Certainly Duck Soup tells a story to link together the comedic spectacles. But it's the desperate energy of those spectacles that powers the film. The Brothers are constantly mugging, even directly addressing us at times to make sure we're loving it. Everything is a bit even if it may push the narrative forward. Obviously, this is the job of any comedian; witness the relentless quest for laughs in the hilarious new HBO Max series Conan O'Brien Must Go. But it's the buffet-style, take-no-prisoners nature of vaudeville that shines through here. As such, Duck Soup feels strikingly modern today. It's over-amped, nerve-wrecked, anarchic, loud, distracted, violent, all the things classical Hollywood cinema is supposed to lack according to viewers who couldn't stomach the black-and-white cinematography of Netflix's Ripley. 

And perhaps the Brothers were savvy in hitting hard and fast. They were lucky enough to survive as a team (minus Zeppo after Duck Soup) into the 1940s when few vaudeville acts ever made it beyond a Vitaphone short. But their imperative is our blessing. Duck Soup is the Marx brothers' finest film, a noise symphony comprised of untranslatable puns, vicious parodies of patriotic anthems, battle sequences making warmongers look as idiotic and reckless as they are, Harpo dangerous with a huge pair of scissors, and the incomparable mirror scene featuring three Grouchos. All that and it's over in is-that-even-feature-length 68 minutes.

Grade: A

Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt, 1984)

The obvious problem with this teens-navigating-the-apocalypse turkey is that Eberhardt didn't have enough script for a 95-minute movie, even though he wrote the thing himself. So when Reggie (Catherine Mary Stewart, Bibi in my beloved The Apple) drives through an empty metropolis after a comet has vaporized most of humanity, we're treated to a painfully slow shot-reverse shot sequence of Reggie looking at deserted buildings - first Reggie, then a deserted building, Reggie, building, Reggie, building, on and on, argh!, until a long shot (and looooong take) catches her driving off into the distance. Instead of conveying crucial narrative information, the sequence says, "whew - that ate up two minutes." The remainder proceeds in this lumpy fashion with a criminally anonymous soundtrack which goes for even more criminally exorbitant sums on Discogs. Mary Waronov and Geoffrey Lewis show up as was de rigueur in the 1980s playing maybe sympathetic, maybe not scientists, I forget which even though I watched this three days ago. Pure video-store fodder, Night of the Comet exists solely for Bad Movie Nights, allowing for plenty of space to talk over it and throw popcorn at the screen.

Grade: D

Raise the Titanic (Jerry Jameson, 1980)

I saw this a month ago and have already forgotten most of it. Helmed by the auteur responsible for Airport '77, the worst of the Airports, it's a drearily competent dinosaur with Jason Robards and Alec Guinness on board to pick up what I hope was a hefty check. The only thing I want to remember is the fact that once the Titanic is raised, the raisers felt it necessary to set up a complete coffee station inside. Check out the background in the pic below.

Grade: C

Late Night with the Devil (Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes, 2023)

SPOILERS

 

I knew exactly how the hotly anticipated Late Night with the Devil would play out - fun windup/compelling concept, muddled ending. Most of the film purports to be a found-footage presentation of the October 31, 1977 episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a late-night talk show in perpetual competition with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. In the hopes of finally gaining a ratings edge over Carson, Delroy (David Dastmalchian, fantastic) dedicates the Halloween episode to the occult by having as guests parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and her supposedly demon-possessed patient Lilly D'Abo (Ingrid Torelli). For a good hour, Late Night with the Devil stuns with its deep commitment to the concept complete with a complex backstory and impressive period work. 

As with 99.9% of horror films, though, co-directors and co-screenwriters Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes botch their hard-won conceptual triumph with a sloppy dénouement. Basic narrative filmmaking dictates that the protagonist has a goal which gets thwarted by the antagonist with their antithetical goal. Indeed, the Cairnes make it clear that Delroy will do anything to beat Carson. As a member of The Grove, a shadowy club of elites, Delroy has access to an enormous store of power. At the film's climax, we learn that The Grove is a satanic cabal with the ability to grant Delroy his wish of ratings victory. But in a Bad Twist Ending Theater-worthy ending, unbeknownst to Delroy, the price extracted for such glory is the death of his wife Madeleine Piper (Georgina Haig).  

But while Delroy's motives are perfectly clear, The Grove remains shadowy indeed. Like too many horror villains, we don't know what they want. Who exactly are these people? There's an obvious reference to Bohemian Grove here so why not flesh out the concept a bit with some despots or capitalists with a political or societal axe to grind? Even more confusingly, if Delroy is indeed a Grove member in (one must presume) good standing, then why has the group extracted such a horrible price from him? Did The Grove get what they wanted? Is Delroy's despair and, given the implications of the sirens at the very end of the film, lifetime imprisonment a success? Is The Grove simply there to create evil? And if so, as I ask of so many horror films, how does this feel-bad ending make it any weightier or worthy of extended reflection than a feel-good ending?

Grade: B+

Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992)

Even at the time, I could sense there was something empty about this adored-by-the-gays black comedy during which I may have lightly chuckled once or twice. Thirty years later, I can better articulate the film's shortcomings. There's just not that much (can it be?) story here. Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play a writer and an actress respectively who have long resented one another. But Zemeckis, along with screenwriters Martin Donovan and David Koepp, tell us so little about their past that all the subsequent Oscar-winning special effects lack narrative urgency. I wanted to learn more about the apparent class animus between the two when they were younger. During a brief moment of calm, Hawn admits that she found Streep too white trash for her presumably higher-class friends. But we're granted little more information than that before the viewer is plunged back into ever-more FX, the gaping hole in Hawn's body after Streep nails her with a shotgun mirroring the hole at the center of the narrative. And the motivation which sets the plot in motion (jealousy over doughy, ineffectual Bruce Willis) is too thin to compensate. I applaud Zemeckis' commitment to cartoonish grotesquerie (at least at this point in his career). But yet again (gawd, I could use a rubber stamp here), there has to be something at stake in the spectacle and Death Becomes Her lacks the sense of purpose that fuels the best cartoons.

Grade: C+ 

February 2024 Top Ten

1. May December (Todd Haynes, 2023) Terrific film. But this entry is about the pitfalls of democracy. I cannot stand when moviegoers need to signal how well they're grasping a film's irony or ineptitude by laughing out loud. It's happened at screenings of Bloodthirsty Butchers (Andy Milligan, 1970),  Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017), and select avant-garde films. And I hear it happens every time a NYC theatre screens a Sirk film, an experience I have so far gratefully avoided. I caught May December on Netflix thereby being spared waves of self-aware snickers. Yes, of course, it's funny (or "funny") when, over dramatic piano music, Julianne Moore's Gracie stops at the fridge to wonder if she has enough hot dogs for a barbecue. In a film about a 34-year-old teacher who engaged in sexual relations with a 12-year-old student, this moment is supposed to cocoon us from becoming too wrapped up in a melodrama that threatens to devolve into a Lifetime Scandal of the Week episode. But is it laugh-out-loud funny? Are you laughing out loud because the humor of the line leaves you no other choice? Or are you laughing to signal to others that you know Haynes is employing some sort of distanciation effect? However annoying I find the resultant laughter, though, it's the chance I take when taking part in the democratic act of moviegoing. As a fervent (albeit sometimes wavering) believer in democracy, there's nothing I can do about this nor, more importantly, would I want to, if only because I'm a hypocrite on this matter. At a recent home viewing of Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), I snickered out loud at Lynch's propensity to ridicule (or poke gentle fun at?) his characters. I snickered to signal to my partner, whose attention was flagging, what Lynch was up to. But he didn't ask for any lesson. And in that moment, I was no better than any smarty pants whose throat I wanted to punch for pulling the focus away from the film onto their erudition. But again, this is democracy. I have a right to bitch and complain and be hypocritical about it all. Hence, this entry.

2. Kleenex/LiLiPUT: The Diary of the Guitarist Marlene Marder (Thrilling Living, 2023) Published in a run of 1,000 in 1986, Kleenex/LiLiPUT: Das Tagebuch der Gitarristin Marlene Marder is a mishmash of flyers, reviews, lyrics, and diary entries from Marder, the guitarist for the landmark Swiss post-punk band LiLiPUT (née Kleenex). I'm one of the lucky few in America to own a copy and while some of the reviews are in English, most of the book is in German which I cannot read (although years before I got my hands on a copy of the book, a German friend wrote down and translated the German lyrics to Kleenex's 1978 "Nice" which I can still sing auf Deutsch to this day). Tons of cool pics. But it just sat on my shelf as a curio from a band I adored so much that I used their name as my first AOL handle. Now, thanks to publisher Grace Ambrose and in a translation by Jen Calleja, it appears in English in a gorgeous coffee table edition. It's not a translation of every word and review from the German edition so LiLiPUT completists (all 100 of you?) will require both books. But the most fascinating aspect of finally getting to read Marder's work is how, well, workaday it is. LiLiPUT’s music seemed to come out of nowhere (aka Switzerland?), a joyous but alien thing rife with squelches and sax blurts and nonsense syllables and whistles and shouts expressing little about the particular women who joined together to make these sounds. But Marder, who died of cancer in 2016, never explains how something as singular as, say, 1981’s “Eisiger Wind” came to fruition. She simply chronicles the typical highs and lows of life on the road/in a band and then it’s over as decisively as “Eisiger Wind” stops after three-and-a-half variable, ass-pinning-back minutes. And perhaps that’s apt. They came to earth and then vanished leaving so little an impression even in their native country that the Swiss arts council which funded the translation had never even heard of the band. 

 3. Steacy Easton: Why Tammy Wynette Matters (University of Texas Press) The ultimate rejoinder to "it's all about the music, man" types. Easton enlarges what counts as popular music by taking seriously such possible apocrypha as the controversial October 4, 1978 kidnapping and Wynette keeping her beautician's license current long past her first success. Precisely because these stories might not be true, Easton analyzes them as a "hermetic and seamless, rooted in the domestic...kind of art"(14). Their thesis: "Wynette crafted a persona, and resisted that persona, and that this kind of persona-crafting is difficult work, work we should recognize" (13). Where more traditional studies would focus on producers and musicians, Easton honors the women who helped Wynette with her clothes, hair, and makeup, women who were more consistent and loyal than any of the men in Wynette's life. So allow me to name them here: Nanette England, Jan Smith, and Jan Howard, the latter of whom enjoyed a substantial recording career of her own. And fret not, music-only types - Easton is an excellent textual analyst, especially in discussions on camp and kitsch. 

 4. Barbra Streisand: My Name is Barbra (Viking Press). At almost 1,000 pages, an offense. A predictable offense, given the subject matter, but an offense nonetheless. There's a fine autobiography lurking within, though. She's erudite on the song choices for her many albums and revealing on the sexism she's encountered in various industries, e.g., Nick Nolte requiring her to sit on his lap so she can give him direction while filming The Prince of Tides. But perhaps a tougher editor could've eliminated such Streisandian wisdom as "1929. Not the most wonderful year, frankly, because that's when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began" 

5. Daniel Clowes: Monica (Fantagraphics). In the first issue of Eightball, Clowes ends a comic with hipster Satanists certain of an eternity of glory upon entering Hell. But Satan deems them suckers for their lifetime of devotion and dumps them into a lake of fire. His latest graphic novel ends with a similar eleventh-hour reversal. Despite all the voices from beyond or attempts at reconciliation or the quests for the meaningfulness of life that pepper this epic tale, nothing but nothing can prevent the unleashing of apocalyptic forces hellbent on (potentially? ineluctably?) destroying life on earth.

6. Fargo, Season 5 (FX) Previous seasons trafficked a bit too much in the near-supernatural character of the principal villains, a drawback that severely afflicts the Coens' No Country for Old Men. This season features a Michael Myersish bad guy as well. But he's disarmed in the end with kindness in a more humane twist on the Final Girl scenario of slasher films. Now that the superb Ted Lasso has found a way to make niceness interesting (and popular), perhaps we'll get more shows where conflicts are resolved with a plate of biscuits instead of violence. Added attraction: Jennifer Jason Leigh's Sandra Bernhard accent.

7. The Curse (Showtime) A Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie creation about a well-meaning white liberal couple (Emma Stone and Fielder) who star in a HGTV show meant to help disenfranchised locals in Española, New Mexico but who wind up gentrifying the area instead. After nine uncomfortable episodes, the titular curse voids the laws of gravity for Fielder. What starts as a hilariously demented take on Fred Astaire's ceiling dance in Royal Wedding quickly becomes harrowing before ending on an oddly comforting note as he gets sucked into space. I don't want an explanation/second season because I want to cherish this solitary moment of peace in an unbearably itchy series.

8. The Crown, "Season 6, Episode 6: Ruritania"(Netfix) Apart from the one about the abdication, this was the best episode of the entire addicting series. Under public pressure to economize, The Queen takes stock of the many people in her employ and we're granted a glimpse into what it takes to run a palace. The Warden of the Swans. The Queen's Herb Strewer. The Queen's Guide to the Sands. Yeoman of the Glass and China Pantry. Astronomer Royal. Piper to the Sovereign. Lord High Admiral of the Wash. All are interviewed by Her Majesty as she learns that "few have truly mastered the Dutch bonnet napkin fold." To the chagrin of anti-royalists, no positions are cut. But it makes for a wonderfully synchronic deep dive/pause before moving on to the Kate Middleton dénouement. 

9. Matthew Solomon, Méliès Boots: Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris (University of Michigan Press) One of the most eccentric books of film scholarship I've ever read. Solomon traces Méliès' career as a theater director and filmmaker to the earlier Méliès family success as a manufacturer of boots. He links the artisanal and industrial nature of shoe production and the international flow of commodities necessitating such a commercial endeavor with Méliès mode of creating films. As such, he places his filmmaking activity in a wildly expansive context, even getting down to the material makeup of celluloid: "The material substrate of cinema was constituted from vegetable matter (cotton, wood) that was chemically treated to yield sheets of celluloid that were cut into strips and emulsified with gelatin made of pulverized animal bones to which crystallized silver was added" (8).

10. JPEGMafia & Danny Brown: Scaring the Hoes (AWAL, 2023) Danny Brown alone is enough, the most sonically generous rapper of our time. I know little about JPEGMafia. But whatever his profile, together with Brown he's created a phantasmagoria that invites a lifetime of exploration. JPEGMafia brings the politics with references to Matt Gaetz, Kyle Rittenhouse, Marjorie Taylor Green, and kicks off the album with "First off, fuck Elon Musk." Brown is the sybarite rapping about sex, drugs, and rap (and politics, fear not). They dis/honor R&B, jazz, and, especially, gospel via samples that they rap against, like magnets stuck haphazardly on a fridge. Titles include "Orange Juice Jones," "Run the Jewels," and, the best, "Jack Harlow Combo Meal." It's all given a glistening, high-register sheen reminiscent of the PC Music aesthetic. The overall effect is akin to being bounced around a pinball machine, scary for the milquetoasts they parody on the title track but exhilarating for those of us who never mind getting our hair mussed. And if somehow all of this isn't enough for you, proceed directly to the Scaring the Hoes: DLC Pack EP which includes another gospel trash compactor number called (thank gawd for copy and paste) "No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!"

2023 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) - This is the kind of film American Fiction satirizes, bloated Oscar bait about the suffering of a disenfranchised group. Hell, even the title was pre-ridiculed by Daniel Clowes in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) - remember The Flower That Drank the Moon? But if it's gotta exist, let it be the work of a master. Scorsese's account of the slaughter of the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma is rich in novelistic detail and earns every moment of its 206-minute [sic] running time. And I'd say that this showcases a career-defining performance for Lily Gladstone if the exquisite Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) hadn't already done so. A-minus.

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) - I'd probably knock it down to B+ today. But I had it at A-minus when I reviewed it after Barbenheimer weekend.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) - I can't believe it either. Reviewed here. B+.

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson) - Tender, welcome evocations of Black middle-class quotidian existence vie with corny satirical jabs at white liberal well-meaningness, promising yet another two-steps-forward, six-steps-back prestige project. But then there's the ending which I initially loved because I thought Jefferson was offering us a pomo Choose Your Own Ending type of dénouement à la Clue. Watching it more closely a second time, I now realize it's more conventional than that. Still, it's looser and jazzier than most prestige projects ever get. I'm impressed. B+.

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)  Like American Fiction, a film to curl up with at various points of the year - December for this one, July for the former. Reviewed here. B+.

Barbie (Greta Gerwig) - Reviewed here. B+.

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet) - Solid. But only the ambiguity of "did he fall or was he pushed?" and its was-it-really 152-minute running time save it from a certain Investigation Discovery feel. Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) covers similar ambiguities with more complexity and a better ventilated conception. It expands where Anatomy of a Fall implodes into its overly localized concerns. And Saint Omer is half an hour shorter. B.

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) - One of the biggest disappointments of the year from a director capable of the very best (Birth, Under the Skin). Reviewed here. B-minus.

Past Lives (Celine Song) - Even more localized than Anatomy of a Fall, a considerable feat given that the film concerns a woman who leaves her native South Korea to become a writer in the USA. Bittersweet if you don't think too hard about it. I just want to know if all the talk about 80,000 layers of fate and past lives and future lives is an apologia for ghosting. A much better film about the importance of living this present life: Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2015). B-minus.

Maestro (Bradley Cooper) - Ugh. And it looked so enticing on the New York Film Festival lineup. Panned here. C-minus. 

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Yorgos Lanthimos finally makes a good film!

I'd loathed every single Lanthimos film I'd seen until 2018's The Favourite where his feel-bad cinema for once evinced some mild subtlety. And now I'm semi-bowled over that he's finally directed a good film. Based on Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel, Poor Things traces the rebirth of Bella (Emma Stone, typically fantastic), a Frankenstein's monster created by Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a surgeon who has reanimated her near-dead body with a baby's brain. As Bella moves beyond mastering basic motor skills and simple sentence structures, she self-actualizes into a brilliant woman, freeing herself from Baxter and his assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) and falling in and out of love with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lumpy lawyer with whom she jetsets around the world. Much of Bella's self-actualization resides in the realm of the sexual - she eagerly becomes a prostitute and fails to see the logic in monogamy. For some viewers, this trajectory makes her a feminist icon; for others, it's the ultimate male fantasy of unbridled sexual availability. But what makes Poor Things somewhat transcend this debate is that it takes her self-actualization as a totality. From eating properly to not punching a crying baby, Bella's journey in becoming reveals the processes we all go through in fashioning a socially acceptable presenting self. And along the way, she/we can reject any of the norms to which we're supposed to adhere, e.g., she has no need to adjust her rigid dance moves if the hilariously unconventional ballroom sequence is any measure. Poor Things helps us examine the truths we hold to be self-evident and Bella's struggle with them reminds us that the self is a perpetual work in becoming.

Of course, how much of the thrill of self-fashioning on display can be laid at Lanthimos' feet is up for debate, especially since I haven't read Gray's novel. Lanthimos fans can be reassured that his misanthropic fish-eye lens remains, thus potentially making Bella yet another of his objects of contempt. Nevertheless, there's a purity of conception here that I never would have thought possible in his cinema. It's no longer impossible imagining him joining us in the human race.

Grade: a carefully hedged B+