Gemko Quibi: January 2024 (Patreon)

As a reminder: These are brief (though they always wind up growing longer and longer) thoughts on films that I'm revisiting mostly just because it's been at least 20 years and I’m feeling nostalgic and/or want to have a rating for them. Mostly stuff that's about to be removed from a streaming service to which I subscribe, so far. See the original post for a fuller explanation. (I'm now throwing in repeat viewings of more recent films as well; those generally used to get no additional words unless my opinion significantly changed or something new occurred to me.)

[Apologies if the spacing looks weird—Patreon made some sort of change that turned what had been double-spaced carriage returns into single-spaced ones. This made everything look jammed together, so I've put the spaces back, but it may well look wonky either in the email or here for some reason.]

Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele): 67/100

Previously seen: 24 February 2017, Oxnard, CA (Plaza Stadium).

Original opinion: 55/100. Here's my Letterboxd review.

Now: Despite the big rating bump, I stand by my previous reservations: "Why us?" never gets a persuasive answer within the context of this story, and the twist, when revealed, takes things in a far less provocative direction. (Plus Peele starts goosing us at the expense of logic—absent the need to milk tension for a viewing audience, there's no reason whatsoever why Mom wouldn't simply tap the spoon and paralyze Chris seconds after he tries to escape. Indeed, most of the movie consists of apparently needless steps, given that Rose's brother grabbing LaKeith Stanfield's character off the street in the prologue seems to have worked just fine.) But Peele constructs his nerve-wracking apparatus so expertly, and Kaluuya (who made my list of the previous decade's 10 greatest performances) does such a surgically precise job of simultaneously playing external politeness and internal bewilderment/anxiety/horror, that those objections seemed comparatively minor. The first half hour, in particular, comes close to being literally flawless by mainstream genre standards—not until the cheap sting when Chris wanders the house at night (and we see I think it's Georgina move through the background) does Peele set a foot even marginally astray. Also got on the right wavelength this time with Rod always immediately jumping to the right insane conclusion, though the stretch when he sorta becomes the protagonist, à la Lila and Sam in Psycho, seems misjudged (since Chris, unlike Marion, is still very much alive). Still don't consider this among the 100 greatest films ever made, by any means, but it's pretty damn good.

The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bodganovich): 90/100

Previously seen: ca. autumn/winter 1991, San Jose, CA (VHS); 15 July 2012, Oxnard, CA (Blu-ray). And now Blu-ray again. Hope to catch a print someday.

Original opinion: It's ranked #5 on the earliest version of my 1971 top 10 list that I can find on archive.org (scraped on 4 October 1999). Second viewing vaulted it to #1, rating 90/100. Here's the short 2012 Letterboxd review.

Now: Just beautifully unemphatic, letting its big theme emerge organically from a bevy of precisely observed details. (Sole, forgivable exception: Sam the Lion's nostalgic monologue. And that has the delightful payoff of Sonny discovering that he was talking about Jacy's mother.) Even Sonny and Duane watching Red River—the goddamn titular event—feels almost tossed off, a casual and impulsive decision on their part, devoid of any real sadness. They're far too young to recognize what they're losing. At the same time, though, Sonny, roughly age 19 as the movie ends, clearly gets a lump in his throat listening to the same school fight song that he and the gang had sung in ironic mockery just the year before. Bogdanovich maintains a perfect tonal balance, and McMurtry spares nobody; we're lucky that Jeff Bridges was just starting out, because a star with a fanbase would never allow himself to look this unattractively, non-comedically hapless. Only occurred to me this time that all the diegetic Hank Williams tunes serve a thematic purpose, at least if you're aware that Williams had maybe a year to live when the movie takes place.

Showing Up (2022, Kelly Reichardt): 67/100

Previously seen: 23 February 2023, Los Angeles, CA (Rodeo screening room).

Original opinion: 67/100. Here's the review from back then.

Now: Clear split this time: Everything involving Lizzy, Jo, their respective work, and the wounded pigeon works beautifully (though the ending's surprisingly pat/obvious for Reichardt and Raymond), whereas I'm not terribly keen on Lizzy's frustrated interactions with her renowned dad, her dad's weird houseguests, her irritable mom, or (especially) her seemingly mentally ill brother. Granted, the film seeks to show a ground-level artist coping with endless hassles and distractions while trying to create, but stuff like Sean digging enormous holes in his backyard while delivering a paranoid rant pushes it too far toward genuine crisis, while Amanda Plummer and Matt Malloy seem to wandered in from a considerably wackier comedy, even though they don't actually do much of anything. Maybe Reichardt's too embedded in this milieu, felt compelled to throw in every anecdote she's come across. Still currently clinging to #10 on my very weak Picture list, but it's Williams' heroically unsympathethic tetchiness that I'll remember in years to come.

Home Alone (1990, Chris Columbus): 43/100

Previously seen: ca. Nov 1990, San Jose, CA (Pruneyard).

Original opinion: Unrecorded, never thought about it again, was surprised to look around at some point and discover that it had become a Yuletide classic.

Now: In my dim memory, 80% of the movie was slapstick home-defense hijinks, so it was quite a surprise to find that Harry and Marv don't actually break in until the last 20 minutes. (A full hour elapses before they even grasp that their sole obstacle is an eight-year-old boy.) Home Alone primarily revels in the enticing pre-adolescent fantasy of being unsupervised, free to do whatever dumbass nonsense you like; already 22 years old and living in my own apartment when Home Alone was released, I didn't experience that sense of freedom as formative. (I'd also been watching Catherine O'Hara for nearly a decade at that point, having discovered SCTV sometime in 1981, so the whole social-media phenomenon of people freaking out upon discovering that she was only 36 in Home Alone seems bizarre. She was not ur-Mom to me, and I certainly did not perceive her as well into middle age here.) Point is, I have no childhood ties to this movie, and you kinda need to, probably—it's just not very strong as an adult-level comedy. Think I only laughed at "Why the hell'd you take your shoes off?" "Why the hell are you dressed like a chicken?" Also, I understand there's no movie if Kevin just calls 911 at 8:58 p.m. that last night, but having him phone the cops as part of his elaborate Rube Goldberg plan raises the question—within the movie—of why he didn't do that to begin with. Glad to see that Kieran got a shit-eating smirk of a close-up all to himself.

Tigerland (2000, Joel Schumacher): 61/100

Previously seen: 16 April 2001, New York, NY (on DVD).

Original opinion: Gave it a B-, mentioned it briefly on the nerd group: "Tigerland, on the other hand, was a very pleasant surprise, since I've detested Joel Schumacher's work for more than a decade. Narrative's undernourished, but the cast (especially It Boy C. Farrell and Clifton Collins Jr.) is uniformly (heh) excellent, and the lurching Dogme thing, while a bit of a cliche now, is still a massive improvement over Schumacher's previous aesthetic bombast. Well worth investigating now that it's out on video; I see that I wasn't the only one here who couldn't quite work up the enthusiasm to see it in theatrical release, despite largely strong reviews."

Now: Still looks like the work of a gifted newcomer rather than the dude who'd just directed Flawless (critics strongly disagreed) and was about to direct Bad Company (to which I gave one of my earliest sub-20 ratings). I'm inclined to give Matthew Libatique most of the credit, but Schumacher hired him and signed off on this jittery scuzzy desaturated 16mm aesthetic, and that's worth applauding. Farrell's just insanely charismatic and commanding, especially looking back after two decades in which he's done his best to escape that box; it's not his fault that Bozz comes across more as a legend than as a credible military iconoclast/fuckup/gadfly/Joker—magically able to get any other grunt out of the army if he perceives the need, promoted to squad leader despite (or, worse, I think "because of" might actually be implied) his constant flagrant insubordination. Entertaining, but hard to swallow (whereas Nicholson's R.P. McMurphy, say, I totally buy). Oh, hey, here's another of those early Michael Shannon performances that I saw before Bug turned him into a name I'd remember thereafter, a single scene of threatening to electrocute someone's balls. Shea Whigham: too crazy, as usual. He's currently too crazy in Eileen!

Falcon Lake (2022, Charlotte Le Bon): 82/100

Previously seen: 5 June 2023, Oxnard, CA (as part of my sample project).

Original opinion: 82/100. Here's my original review.

Now: Started noting moments I found formally dazzling and just never stopped; almost everything seems perfectly judged. Chloe disappears underwater, Bas anxiously waits for her to resurface, and then suddenly she's lying "dead" on the road. Slow dissolve to a wooded path that remains devoid of human figures for ten eerily long seconds before the kids finally round a corner into frame. (That particular camera setup recurs multiple times with growing impact.) I don't even know how to articulate the power of one brief shot that frames Chloe against trees that slope slightly downward from left to right, with a sickly-looking sun precisely at the upper center; she then walks right to left, her head roughly mirroring the treeline, while looking at photos and muttering "I don't look dead enough." In the Skandies, I define Best Scene in part as "longer than a moment," and while I don't think any of my 10 votes in that category will come from this film (strongest contender is perhaps the party sequence, Bas briefly becoming the center of attention and then immediately feeling ignored and inconsequential again), it delivered a huge percentage of my favorite cinematic moments from last year. (Plus my favorite inanimate object: the armchair at the lake.) Second viewing revealed some expert foreshadowing, e.g. Chloe telling Bas "You suck at this" when he wraps himself in a sheet and plays ghost to hide that he's naked below the waist, having soiled his pajamas via nocturnal emission. That the entire critical community slept on Falcon Lake makes me feel as if I've taken crazy pills. C'est magnifique, you ding-dongs.

Nine Queens (2000, Fabián Bielinsky): 53/100

Previously seen: 28 April 2001, New York, NY (Walter Reade, in a program of recent Argentine cinema).

Original opinion: C+, with a post hoc 53/100 rating allotted the following year when it turned up in U.S. theaters. (I somehow neglected to add the equivalent three stars on Letterboxd—probably because I only checked 2002 NYC commercial releases that had premiered in 2001, not in 2000—so Nine Queens inaccurately landed on my massive auto-generated list of unrated films. Not sorry to have revisited it, though, since the rating was applied over a year after I saw the movie and was a rough guess. There are a bunch of such cases; I should probably take a second look at 'em.) Wrote a short review at the time.

Now: 53/100 was correct. Despite having essentially seen this film twice (if you count Criminal, the American remake starring John C. Reilly, Diego Luna and Maggie Gyllenhaal), I'd completely forgotten the twist's nature...but I correctly guessed it yet again, never falling for the elaborate fake-out in which we're supposed to think that an entirely different long con is being executed. (I'll concede that having Juan jump to that same conclusion is a nice touch.) You can really only get snookered by this sort of thing once, and Mamet got there first for me, thanks to my having been too young when I first saw The Sting to remember it clearly. Also, what happens with the bank, though explained at the end, is kind of a cheat, designed to make one key aspect of the plan seem entirely beyond the con artist's control. Wish there were anything of interest at all going on beneath the surface, or that Bielinsky's direction were ever more than purely functional—I noted the constant sound of paper shredding in one scene, which has an unnerving effect similar to the firecrackers at Rahad's pad in Boogie Nights, but that's about it. A cinematic beach read, basically. 

Predator 2 (1990, Stephen Hopkins): 42/100

Previously seen: ca. November 1990, San Jose, CA (Pruneyard).

Original opinion: Unrecorded, definitely negative.

Now: Unrelentingly stupid, from "what if the jungle were urban this time?" (I'd completely forgotten that Predator 2 was set seven years in the future; only real sign of that to my eyes, apart from the hellhole bullshit, is a then-nonexistent L.A. subway that's clearly recognizable as BART) to the Jamaican Voodoo Posse to Bill Paxton's painfully strenuous efforts at providing comic relief. Hopkins lacks McTiernan's deft hand, preferring to assault the viewer with gunfire and explosions; Glover's performance amounts to one long angry bellow. Improves in the home stretch, with flashlight beams struggling their way through particulate matter during the ultraviolet ambush and Harrigan eventually pursuing the Predator onto its spaceship, the interior of which boasts a surprisingly cool design (at least until Hopkins floods it with dry ice for some reason). Passes the time, but every single moment of this had evaporated in the 33+ years since I last saw it, and I'll have forgotten it all again by next month.

Footloose (1984, Herbert Ross): 41/100

Previously seen: ca. February 1984, San Jose, CA (Century 23).

Original opinion: Unrecorded, unknown. Vaguely recalled it as fine.

Now: I owe John Lithgow an apology, as I'd misremembered his performance as a painfully broad caricature of aggressive religious intolerance. He actually tries for something more nuanced, getting hamstrung mostly by a screenplay that makes the Reverend less complex than just wildly inconsistent, railing against sinful gyrations one moment and being horrified by book burnings the next. As for the rest—look, I was a teenager in the '80s, have plenty of affectionate nostalgia for the '80s, and this is too fucking '80s even for me. If I Eternal Sunshine'd all Footloose knowledge (including the existence of Kevin Bacon and Chris Penn—btw, was unprepared to see Nice Guy Eddie so young and skinny, what a shock) from your brain, then showed you the "Let's Hear It for the Boy" montage and told you it was a fairly recent Walk Hard-style over-the-top parody of '80s movies, you would have no reason whatsoever to question that statement. Just corny beyond belief. Also, I hated these songs even at the time, though it's damn impressive that Dean Pitchford, who wrote the screenplay, also cowrote "Footloose" and "Let's Hear It" and "Almost Paradise" and "Holding Out for a Hero" (tolerable, thanks Jim Steinman) and "Dancing in the Sheets" (I guess that's okay too). Oh, and for fuck's sake why have the bully start a brawl at the big dance if that's not gonna at least temporarily seem to confirm the town's small-minded notions? What a wasted opportunity. Mildly surprised to hear Ren deem Slaughterhouse-Five "a classic" relatively soon after its publication; today's equivalent would be Inherent Vice. 

Asteroid City (2023, Wes Anderson): 65/100

Previously seen: 27 June 2023, Oxnard, CA (Century Riverpark).

Original opinion: 65/100. Here's that there review.

Now: Still immensely enjoyable moment-to-moment, still doesn't come together for me in a transcendent or even particularly powerful way. I think maybe the "play":"backstage" ratio—both of those designations really demand scare quotes—needed to be tweaked; we spend so much time with Asteroid City's "denizens" (I mean it's all scare quotes), and so little time with Conrad Earp and Schubert Green and Mercedes Ford and Jones Hall and I just had to look up the name of Hong Chau's character (Polly), that the metatextual stuff winds up having the appearance of an impact, not an actual impact. If that makes sense. Possibly one could make a case that this is by crafty design, but it's still not quite playing for me. There's also some excess preciousness and fussiness here, even by Wes standards (it's admittedly a fine line)—stuff like Swinton's Dr. Hickenlooper addressing the Junior Stargazers from behind a lectern, using a microphone, and then suddenly and for no good reason stepping forward to the stage's lip, causing Tony Revolori's aide-de-camp to sprint forward and place a second microphone in this new spot. Too much business, deliberately, à la Schubert's mild criticism of Jones as Augie? You can second-guess a lot in this artificial context, but I remain at a pleasant remove.

Mr. Mom (1983, Stan Dragoti): 37/100

Previously seen: I do not remember. Not in theatrical release. Pretty much had to have been sometime between 1986 and 1990, either on cable or I rented it.

Original opinion: Unrecorded, no recollection.

Now: He's Mr. Mom, so...Dad. Even looking past the dated gender-role bullshit—dudes can't use a vacuum cleaner, grab the bottom grapefruit from a pile and send the others spilling to the floor, lose track of their small children, etc.—this is just almost never funny; Michael Keaton sands down his sharp edges for the role, coming to life only when Jack tries to intimidate his wife's lecherous boss by walking into the house with a chainsaw running, or during the brief stretch when he grows a beard and starts losing his mind. Great comic actors—Martin Mull, Jeffrey Tambor, Christopher Lloyd, Graham Jarvis—are given little or (in Lloyd's case) literally nothing to do. Dragoti executes one stretch of escalating household disasters so ineptly that I lost my own mind and started imagining that I were watching Buster instead of Michael. For all that, Mr. Mom is never really actively awful (à la, say, Bachelor Party)—just utterly forgettable. I didn't think about it for over 30 years, and will now never think of it again. 

Night Nurse (1931, William A. Wellman): 58/100

Previously seen: 14 February 1995, New York, NY (some class at NYU).

Original opinion: Unrecorded, no memory.

Now: All I remembered, in fact, was that Night Nurse hilariously keeps finding reasons for Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell to strip down to their underwear—calibrating for the era, there's arguably more gratuitous skin here than there is in Species. That's primarily in the superior first half, set almost entirely in a hospital's administrative/employee spaces (office, locker room, etc.) and focused on Lora navigating her new vocation; with its stern, disapproving superintendent and goofy, harmless pranks (skeleton in the bed), this could be the distaff pre-Code Animal House, just about. I'm less keen on the melodramatic and surprisingly grave plot that eventually emerges, pitting Lora against Clark Gable's evil chauffeur (!), who's trying to starve two adorable little girls to death so that their inheritance can come to him (via marriage to their mother, though that part of the plan remains theoretical). Stanwyck gets to play tough and courageous but also has to fret a great deal, and a lengthy scene in which Lora tries to get the girls' super-drunk mother to the nursery doesn't even make sense, since it's not as if Mom can save them by breathing alcohol fumes into their little faces or something. If you could somehow weld the first half of Night Nurse to the second half of Safe in Hell (another '31 Wellman joint, and of course he also directed The Public Enemy that year), you'd really have something. Though not something that would necessarily be coherent.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999, John McTiernan): 57/100

Previously seen: 7 August 1999, New York, NY (I believe at the Criterion, a '30s-built Times Square theater that shut down less than a year later).

Original opinion: B minus. I reviewed it on my site at the time.

Now: Still modestly enjoyable, but this time I experienced a sharp break around the midpoint, which is when the movie shifts from being an evenly matched battle of wits—and what a pleasure just to watch two beautiful people repeatedly outsmart each other; R.I.P. mid-budget studio movies without a grotesque $600-mil-worldwide-or-bust mentality—to a story about an insanely self-possessed gazillionaire and the woman who might just have let herself become too emotionally involved. (Crown's scenes with his shrink don't really balance the scales, since they register mostly as an excuse for Dunaway's cameo. You'd think I'd have watched the '68 version, eh, given that Jewison just passed away and I'd finished Moonstruck literally five minutes earlier? But no, this came up via random selection, leaving HBO Max on the 1st.) There's a tinge of sexism to the dynamic here, but I was often too busy panting at Russo lying naked on top of an equally naked Brosnan to be all that put off by it; let's get sex back in the movies and freak out all the weirdly prudish kids. Don't need any more truly dreadful Bill Conti scores like this one, though. 

As a supplement, some brief notes re: movies I bailed on last month. (Actually just one this time.)

The Color Purple (Blitz Bazawule): Never understood how Walker's novel and/or Spielberg's adaptation could work as a musical—why not add stirring numbers to Sansho the Bailiff, while you're at it?—and now that I've seen 47 minutes' worth, I still don't get it. Only "Somebody Gonna Love You," which is explicitly staged as Celie's fantasy and thus works in the contrapuntal manner of Dancer in the Dark or Dennis Potter, avoids jarring tonal disruption; Broadway razzle-dazzle is just all wrong for a story this unrelentingly bleak, even if the numbers themselves are generally quite good (certainly better than the little I endured of Wonka that same night). Also, Bazawule needs to let go of his penchant for having bright sunlight blow out part of every damn frame.