Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993)

Like so much Hollywood product, Mrs. Doubtfire pushed and pulled me. The pie in the face is truly classic, a savvy variation on an ancient comedy staple. And the climactic restaurant scene in which Robin Williams switches between Daniel and Mrs. Doubtfire generates some genuine (albeit silly) narrative tension. But though I know full well that 1993 was a long time ago (was it, though?), I still bristled at the transphobic, "Oh I'm not really a dude" comments. I admired the fact that a heterosexual couple was not formed at the end of the film. But the effect is severely diminished by Mrs. Doubtfire's closing monologue about how there are all different kinds of families, failing to mention that Heather could have two mommies. Then there's the pathetic portrayal of Daniel's gay brother (Harvey Fierstein) and his boyfriend (Scott Capurro) who exist solely (and with mere minutes of screen time, barely!) to uphold the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Then there's the demonization of Sally Field as a working mother. And the suggestion that men do better at the housekeeping roles to which women have been relegated. And Columbus' workaday direction. ARGH! Hooray for Hollywood! Grade: C+.

Cinephilia in the Time of COVID-19

Here is a surfeit of links to streaming sites for discerning filmgoers in isolation. Feel free to make suggestions.

Update: I've just been apprised of this insanely thorough resource courtesy of Regina Longo which subsumes much of the below. It's a Google doc listing TONS of streaming sites. Wow!!!

And I've received word that "Starting Friday, 3/27, Pedro Costa's VITALINA VARELA will be available to stream on [Grasshopper Films'] site." Check back here next week to stream this masterpiece. I gush about it here. 

Get your avant-garde on with UbuWeb, the long-running (and oft-controversial) repository for experimental film (music and writing and more too!).

Here's a Google doc called CABIN FEVER: Coping with COVID-19 playlist of online experimental films & videos, a list of avant films to stream mostly on Vimeo.

The divine Rarefilmm:The Cave of Forgotten Films is Netflix for Karagarga abusers (or those who long to be). I strongly suggest You Can Succeed, Too (Eizô Sugawa, 1966) which I gushed about here.

Open Culture has an epic list of 1,150 Free Movies Online. Some links are dead. But masterpieces and obscurities abound.

The Danish Film Institute plans to digitize over 400 silent Danish films. Currently, over 61 titles are streaming here.  

Screen Slate, the indispensable NYC film listing aggregator, has pivoted to "Stream Slate" mode. Even if you don't live in NYC, you should sign up for streaming goodies. 

Film at Lincoln Center has partnered with Kino Lorber to stream my vote for the greatest film of the year so far, Bacurau! Stream it here. I rave here. 

The Ann Arbor Film Festival will happen online as a free, live-streamed, six-day event March 24 - 29th. Info here.   

Collectif Jeune Cinéma have made some of their (mostly experimental) films available for free on Vimeo here.

Don't forget the Internet Archive is a cavernous repository for films including the Prelinger Archives. And while there, check out my favorite Christmas movie, The Holly and the Ivy.

Finally, for those who have already seen Contagion, I've made a list on Letterboxd of pre-1967 films about viruses, epidemics, outbreaks, plagues, quarantines, etc.

The Other Side of Midnight (Charles Jarrott, 1977)

You know what film is better than Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)? The Other Side of Midnight! I make the comparison only because according to Wikipedia, Fox worried that the budget-busting Star Wars would flop whereas they assumed Midnight, based on Sidney Sheldon's 1973 blockbuster novel, would soar on to box-office glory. Midnight performed better than history remembers but nowhere near as well as the Lucas/Diznee franchise that refuses to die (to be fair, though, Sheldon fed his franchise jones by writing a sequel called Memories of Midnight in 1990). And today, it's largely forgotten when not being dismissed as trash. But as a portrait of the straitjackets placed on women by patriarchal capitalism, it stings like Valley of the Dolls*, if not Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995).

One might expect a slog given Jarrott's sterile filmography including the disastrous 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon. Instead, its 165 minutes become increasingly agitated and desperate, connecting the fates of two women, Noelle (Marie-France Pisier) and Catherine (Susan Sarandon), to one good-for-little hunk, Larry (John Beck), who winds up ruining both their lives. Noelle uses her body to get ahead, Catherine her smarts but both wind up dogged by Larry who cannot keep his cock in one continent (moral: don't ghost!). Catherine's devolution into alcoholism is unconvincing even in terms of raw screen time (we barely see her with a drink), leading to the conclusion that the creators could not imagine a fate for women beyond being wed, dead, or sequestered in a nunnery. But maybe that's just the filmmakers' way of being honest. To imagine otherwise might open up the film to empty fantasy. Andrew Britton, one of the few (only?) critics to take the film seriously, comes to a similar conclusion at the end of a brilliant 1981 review (available in The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton):

"The dramatization of the oppression of women, as is so often the case in even the most distinguished melodramas, builds in the impossibility of the struggle against it, so that patriarchal relations seem at once intolerable and mysteriously impermeable and women are compelled to assume the role of 'victim.' This clearly limits the film’s achievement, but it doesn’t outweigh or invalidate its substantial insights, or diminish one’s gratitude for it at a moment when Urban Cowboy (1980), Honeysuckle Rose (1980), and the rest are setting the tone for a systematic antifeminist reaction" (284).

Britton died of complications from AIDS in 1994. But given the above insights, I have full confidence that he would have recognized Showgirls for the masterpiece that it is.

Grade: A-minus

*the novel, not the dull 1967 film although Midnight may loosen me up to its charms on a rewatch

The Best Film of 2020 (so far!)

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) starts at Point A and winds up at Point ∫ba∫dc|ru×rv|dudv (stole that from some math website). I don't want to say too much more because the story twists up like a wiener package and you'll be stunned at the unpredictable vectors it takes. It concerns the fictional utopia of Bacurau, a dusty village in Northeastern Brazil sometime in the near future. The first third runs its finger over the contours of the village, delineating its operations in a manner most Fordian. But utopias fail to generate much profit so complications arise. And then more complications arise... Swerving in and out of social realism, art-film ellipsis, and extreme violence, Bacurau elicits complicated reactions from the viewer. You guffaw at the carnage when you're not baffled by this unexplained development or that unidentified flying object [sic!]. In its florid wipes and contrapuntal use of popular music, it recalls the operatic mythmaking of a great Cinema Novo classic like Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Glauber Rocha, 1964). But more immediately, it's of a piece with recent popular (populist?) titles such as Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) and Uncut Gems (The Safdie Brothers, 2019), films that use class aspirations to fuel narrative intensity. Bacurau is even richer, though, because it tries to envision a classless society with no need for aspirations. Ten years in development, it somehow has arrived right on time as an allegory about the terror Bolsonaro has unleashed on Brazil, prompting Howard Hampton in Artforum to deem the film "[p]erpetually in and outside of the present moment." I fully support a campaign to have it win the Best Picture Oscar next year. Grade: A+.