Till the End of Time (Edward Dmytryk, 1946)

This WWII-GIs-coming-home nugget has been overshadowed by William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives from the same year. But while it lacks Wyler deep-focus savvy, it often matches his film in intensity and compassion. There's a scene a third of the way through that is as harrowing as any in Best Years. At a restaurant, principals Guy Madison and Dorothy McGuire notice a marine (Richard Benedict) having a breakdown. They encircle him as a de facto shield from the public and get him to stop violently shaking. It's not only a moment of supreme humanity but it's also one of the most accurate depictions of a panic attack I've ever seen in a film, especially the fear that everyone around you is watching and judging your inability to keep it together. And later in the film, Madison and his buddy Robert Mitchum beat the crap out of some racists in a bar, always a welcome sight.

There's plenty of man flesh on display too. Guy Madison is comically beautiful; he looks like a cartoon character. Lucky Ruth Nelson, playing his mom, gets to touch his foot. And Jean Porter tells Johnny Sands that he needs to put some clothes on (calm down - he's 18). 

Bottoms (Emma Seligman, 2023)

SPOILERS (although the film is so baffling I'm not sure what exactly I'm spoiling)

For the record, I adore Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham, 2018), Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 2019), and Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (Josh Greenbaum, 2021) and I think The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961) is one of the greatest films ever made. So comedy (or even satire per se) has never been my problem, hence why I feel comfortable deeming Bottoms a disaster of tone and comedic structure, the biggest disappointment of the year. 

The story concerns PJ (Rachel Sennot, who co-wrote the screenplay with Seligman) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri, terrific), two lesbians at Rockbridge Falls High School trying to get laid before graduation. Both are infatuated with cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber) even though both are apparently straight. At the local fair, Isabel has a fight with her boyfriend, hunky quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), and she hops in Josie's car to escape him. Jeff refuses to move from the front of the vehicle and Josie drives forward, lightly tapping Jeff's knee. But Jeff reacts as if he's been rammed at full speed. It looks as if he's about to lose consciousness as his team runs to his aid and Josie drives off with PJ and Isabel. 

OK a little odd. But here, not even ten minutes into the film, is where the film starts to lose its grip on comedy. In school the following day, Jeff is on crutches and the entire school (even the queer kids for some reason) is mad at Josie and PJ for "maiming" Jeff. But after class, Jeff, out of focus in the background, walks perfectly well with his crutches in his hands. Two scenes later in a long shot, he comes out to the football field on crutches and then casts them aside, presumably cured.

Questions: Wiki (which I had to turn to for basic narrative assistance) says he was "feigning severe injury." Why? What is Jeff's motivation? The "injury" serves the narrative purpose of causing PJ and Josie to get in trouble. The principal calls the duo into his office and castigates them for maiming the star quarterback. They convince him that they were merely practicing for a female empowerment fight club which gives them the idea to make the club a reality in the hopes of getting closer to Isabel and Brittany, a ploy which takes up much of the remaining film. But what purpose does it serve Jeff to have feigned severe injury? Most importantly, why is this funny? And why is Seligman relegating her putative jokes to long shots and out-of-focus backgrounds? It bespeaks a lack of confidence in the comedy rather than any absurdist quirks.

Even more confusing (and equally unfunny) is the climactic football game. Josie learns that Huntington, the rival team, is planning to murder [sic] Jeff by spraying the field with pineapple to which Jeff is allergic. Josie and the club members cover the sprinklers. But Huntington starts to attack the girls. An all-out fight breaks out. But for no discernible reason, the Rockbridge players fall back leaving the girls to battle on their own. Presumably (an adverb which should have no purchase in a mainstream narrative film), the girls are no longer covering the sprinklers and, in a long shot (yet again), the team seems to be caught in a mist of pineapple juice. 

 

Because this is a long shot, it is difficult to tell if the sprinklers have indeed been uncovered. Josie has carried Jeff off the field. But in this shot, we see a player pass out. Is the entire team now allergic to pineapple too? The other players seem to be recoiling in terror. Are they suddenly scared of Huntington even though the teams were taunting each other a few moments prior? And presuming any of this is funny, why is it in a long shot where the details and chain of cause and effect are difficult to make out? The only indication that the sprinklers may be engaged is an occasional mist on the field. But then, after the girls have laid out the entire Huntington team, the sprinklers turn (back?) on. 

Some will chalk up these inconsistencies to absurdist humor. But there are more effective and sure-footed ways to situate absurdity in comedy. Lewis' The Ladies Man doesn't even tell a story and manages to exploit the film medium more totally than any film extant. The funniest moment in Barb and Star occurs at the climax when the titular duo needs a jet ski to throw a mosquito-attracting homing beacon into the ocean. The owner of the jet ski absurdly tells them they can borrow it because he needs no further information. This one line makes hay of cause and effect but still allows the story to continue. And it's not hiding in the background like some wallflower of a joke. The humor (such that is) in Bottoms is just sloppy and uncertain.

Worst of all, Bottoms traffics in a conventionality that undercuts its celebrated queerness. There are tortured narrative reasons why the film centers on football even though sports are the source of so much queer pain. But however much logic (or humor) those reasons lend the story, they nevertheless compromise the film's queerness. When Josie goes to visit Rhodes (Punkie Johnson), a lesbian elder, for advice, the scene posits queerness as a melancholy lot in life, a stereotypical, if not homophobic, narrative structure.* Rhodes confesses that she never had many friends in high school and as she's "gotten older in this world, it's just gotten more sad." Why precisely she's sadder now is left unexamined. And while we know little about Rhodes' queer present, Rhodes somehow knows a great deal about football. She informs Josie about the longstanding rivalry between Rockbridge and Huntington and that impels Josie to convince PJ to save Rockbridge in the film's climax. But why, in a film that supposedly performs a queer spin on the high-school comedy, does the writer/director privilege knowledge of football history over even the briefest exploration of a lesbian present, and an elder lesbian present at that? For what it's worth, in over two decades of schooling, I never once attended a football game and thus knew nothing about any rivalries, no matter how longstanding or murderous. I do recall, vividly, being made to feel improperly socialized for failing to take up a traditional masculine role in playing sports and caring about them.

When Josie explains to PJ why they should save the football team, it does indeed make narrative sense. The entire school has learned about Josie and PJ's ploy for using the club as a way to get laid. Josie reminds PJ of this betrayal and convinces her that saving Rockbridge would be a good way to win back their trust and show off what they learned in the club. But it makes no thematic, much less emotional, sense. When PJ retorts, "Sorry, you're saying you want me and then you and then all the girls that fuckin' hate us to get together and save some fuckin' football player, who we hate? Circle of bad vibes," that's precisely the response I had. And Josie's narratively coherent explanation fails to negate that, the circle of bad vibes and past humiliations in gym class washing over the remainder of the film.

Grade: C

*For more on this aspect of queer representation, see Richard Dyer, "Coming Out as Going In: The Image of the Homosexual as a Sad Young Man" in The Culture of Queers (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 116-136.

The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982)

VAGUE SPOILERS

 

The Mr. asked me why I would keep the digital file of The Verdict that I procured to watch this feted middlebrow product. And that's as good a summation as any about our feelings for this extremely okay film - far from a masterpiece but not bad enough to get enraged about or make fun of. The first half is an unforgiving drag. Paul Newman plays an alcoholic lawyer who takes on a malpractice case that is sure to be settled out of court. The case centers on a comatose woman whom Newman observes several times in a hospital. During one visit, he has an unconvincing epiphany (signified by staring at her longer than previously) and decides to try the case for more money. The trial picks up the pace. But at 75 minutes into the film, it comes far too late. Lumet and screenwriter David Mamet perform a twist on the trope of the younger female foil (Charlotte Rampling) improbably falling for the older loser male (Newman). But no matter how duplicitous this femme fatale turns out to be, it's still no fun watching Newman smack the shit out of her. And despite the fact that the film does not end with the formation of the heterosexual couple, it's still so competent, so blandly well-done that it forces one to ponder saving 3.12GB on an external hard drive by junking it altogether. 

Grade: B

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, September 17, 2023)

The performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre last Sunday was the first Stephen Sondheim show to leave me underwhelmed. But I'm struggling to posit reasons why. Maybe I remain too in awe of the first Sweeney Todd I saw, the 1982 TV movie with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn as Mrs. Lovett and Todd, respectively. Maybe the leads were miscast. Annaleigh Ashford and Nicholas Christopher (filling in for Josh Groban which was why our tickets were cheaper than usual) possess gargantuan talent, especially Christopher who was dripping with sweat for many minutes after a fiery "Epiphany." But both seemed too young for the roles (as I suspect Groban is too) and neither were as rotted or scary as Lansbury and Hearn. And maybe, just maybe, Sweeney Todd pales in comparison to Company, Into the Woods, Assassins, etc. For once, a Sondheim musical bore the two negative hallmarks of a Broadway show - too long and too many ballads. Still, nothing could detract from the power of the best number - "The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd" which opens and closes the show and is reprised throughout. That's because, as always, it's an ensemble number, Broadway's greatest gift to humankind. With queerly high tenors and screeching sopranos building to near glossolalia, Sondheim skirts the edge of chaos. To quote Salieri in Amadeus, it was both terrifying and wonderful to watch.  

Grade: B

 

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967); 11.22.63 (Hulu, 2016); Parkland (Peter Landesman, 2013)

SPOILERS

Point Blank is the quintessential JFK-assassination-hangover film. During a robbery on Alcatraz of a crime/business syndicate known as The Organization, Walker (Lee Marvin) is ambushed and left by dead by his heist partner Reese (John Vernon). Upon regaining consciousness, he spends the rest of the film trying to recover $93,000, his half of the heist, with a doggedness worthy of Jim Garrison (he utters "$93,000" so often that it takes on the contours of a conspiracy theorist's mantra - "magic bullet" or "grassy knoll"). That requires him to navigate The Organization's hall of mirrors and Boorman, along with Phillip H. Lathrop's dazed cinematography, dumbfounds with his portrait of an unknowable, rhizomatic ecosystem - penthouses across from penthouses, rooms within rooms within rooms, mirrors that are doors, heel clicks and soul screams (courtesy of Stu Gardner) and intercom announcements that disorient with their ability to transgress space, characters who intone robotic business speak, and, of course, snipers in disparate locales. Walker himself is a cipher. He has no known first name. But that's okay - in a mildly feminist twist, his paramour Chris (Angie Dickinson) has no known last name. And as a measure of his extreme indifference to anything unrelated to his $93,000, he thanks the gay men (Ron Walters and George Strattan) he holds hostage as a ruse to divert the attention of the phalanx of suits guarding Reese.

Walker runs through several important functionaries in this Organization with no success. If he could just find the top man who "runs things," then he can retrieve his money. But no discernible hierarchy exists; once Walker thinks he's found the highest executive, there's always someone higher and more mysterious. Nowhere is this baffling reality more redolent than in the scene in which Walker confronts Brewster (Carroll O'Connor). Nope, he's not the top man either and he's almost petulant about all the trouble Walker has caused: "You threaten a financial structure like this for $93,000?" As an officer in The Organization, he explains corporations to Walker. They deal in millions but never in cash; Brewster himself has only $11 in his pocket. But both remain as obstinate as toddlers. Even though he feels it's pointless, Brewster takes him to see Fairfax (Keenan Wynn) who shoots Brewster dead and assures Walker that Brewster "was the last one." Finally, Walker has found the top man. But wait - isn't this Yost, the man he partnered with in the beginning of the film to find Reese and his $93,000? Then who he is really? Walker doesn't know and recedes into the shadows like a sniper. Yost/Fairfax drops off the money and leaves. But Walker doesn't retrieve it; he doesn't even emerge from the shadows. The film ends with a long shot of Alcatraz and Boorman strands us with one of cinema's most searing portrayals of the indifference of capital and all its byzantine organizations. 

Based on a typically bloated Stephen King novel, 11.22.63 has an intriguing premise. Jake Epping (James Franco) must travel back to 1960 and gear up to prevent the assassination of JFK. But King's 849-page novel means that it must be translated into a eight-episode miniseries with far too many time-wasting diversions and preposterous coincidences. Fascinating when it sticks to the assassination plot. But someone get this man an editor!

Parkland falls somewhere in between. Based on Vincent Bugliosi's Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it runs a tight 93 minutes even though Bugliosi's book is over 1,600 pages long! With an attractive cast including Zac Efron as Dr. Charles James "Jim" Carrico, Jeremy Strong as Lee Harvey Oswald (perfect training for Kendall Roy in Succession), and Jimmie Dale Gilmore as Reverend Saunders, Parkland comes off as a little more than a Wiki page. But as a minute-to-minute recreation of 11/22/63, its merciful briskness lends it a great deal more utility than the average Oscar prestige pic.

Point Blank: A+

11.22.63: B-minus

Parkland: B+