Film review: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

 

Obviously, Frank Capra's greatest movie is It Happened One Night.  The later Mr. Deeds is also very good, but a step towards the maudlin (that reaches its apotheosis in It's a Wonderful Life), and this, from two years after that, continues the descent.  This can't entirely be blamed on Capra as it's based on a very popular play, but there's altogether too much whimsy for my liking, not to mention outright "zaniness."  The reliable Jean Arthur returns from Deeds, but instead of Gary Cooper we have the first Jimmy Stewart-Capra pairing, and the two seem to bring out the worst in each other.  That's not to say that it's unbearable by any means - it's thoroughly watchable and definitely has its moments, but I don't want my heart warmed as much as this film seems intent on warming it.  The plot is this: cold-hearted mogul Anthony Kirby (Edward Arnold) intends to corner the munitions market, what with war brewing (yes, he's a war profiteer in the making, which makes his eventual redemption all-the-more improbable), and to do so he hatches a plot to force an old friend to sell his factory by buying up all the real-estate completely surrounding it so that he can't keep it running.  The only barrier to this fiendish plot is a single family who happen to own their house outright: and coincidentally (and unknown to Kirby), the granddaughter of the family patriarch Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore, ladling on the twinkly charm), Jean Arthur's Alice Sycamore, is both secretary and object of affection of his son Tony (Stewart, of course). As Kirby relies on an intermediary to do his real estate shenanigans he never meets the Vanderhofs, and it is only comparatively late in the film that Kirby realizes that it's the Vanderhofs who have been thwarting his big acquisition.  But the reason the Vanderhofs can hold out is because Martin himself was a successful businessman who had an epiphany while riding up the elevator to his office one day and turned around and hasn't worked ever since.  He decided to pursue what made him happy (stamp collecting - and he makes some money by appraising others' collections) and to provide a refuge for others to do the same.  Consequently the whole family and attendant hangers on (one of whom Martin acquires on a visit to the real-estate man's office, in one of the more humorous scenes in the film) happily pursues their "quirky" hobbies - from dancing, to play-writing, 

to candy-making, to firework testing (a key plot point).  Martin (who spends the whole film on crutches - ostensibly because he was sliding down the bannisters like his granddaughters, but one wonders if Barrymore just happened to be incapacitated during the shoot) is beloved by the whole block, all of whom know they will be evicted if the last holdout sells.  Meanwhile, Martin's real reason for not wanting to leave is because the house still reminds him of his beloved dead wife.  Anyway, things start to unravel when Alice, who knows that Tony's snooty parents (especially his mother) disapprove of her (especially after an unfortunate event in a restaurant), 

wants to invite them to a carefully orchestrated meal at the house, but Tony, who likes the crazy family and doesn't care what his parents think, tell his parents the wrong day, and they show up and see the house in full craziness.  After a final indignity of Kirby senior being thrown by Alice's sister's particularly eccentric Russian dance instructor, 

the Kirbys are on the way out (and Alice is furious with Tony) when the cops raid (it would take too long to explain, but they think the house is a hotbed of radicals) and accidentally set off all the fireworks in the basement.  Only when the whole Vanderhof and Kirby clans are in the drunk tank does the penny drop of who's who.  Martin briefly loses his temper with Kirby senior and tells him exactly what he is, only to regret it immediately and slip a harmonica in his pocket to make up for it.  After a - you guessed it - heartwarming courtroom scene (where, in a precursor to the famous money scene in Life, all the Vanderhof friends have a whip-round) - things look like they're unraveling, because Alice goes into hiding out of town because she's so angry at Tony, making the rest of the family miserable, to the extent that Martin thinks he has to sell the house and move nearer her.  Kirby's plot is completed, causing his rival's factory to fail and his rival to collapse dead of a heart attack, shortly after warning Kirby how he will die hated.  

How will everything resolve?  You can probably guess that it's going to involve that harmonica...

Wind, weeds (in the lake) and biting flies (on the walk)

Buying Thomas a Law laptop

Thomas is between graduating from law school and being kicked out of his apartment in Ann Arbor, so Jami got it into her head to use this time to get him a laptop for his law career from the UM Tech Shop, where students and employees get a discount. So I took him there. Here he is:

...and here's the salesman taking my credit card info for his chosen Microsoft Surface Laptop

Meanwhile, Thomas has been burning up in the sweltering heatwave, so requested I bring up the spare AC unit. There were some difficulties installing it in his side-opening window, though...

The view from outside

Will it stay in the window? Only time will tell.

Drifting pleasantly across Wildwood Lake

You can rent the cabin you can see to Frederick's left (and its twin unseen to his right). The beds are too small for our family, though.

Why was this van parked here? Nobody was around to tell us...

We walked from 19 clockwise round Wildwood Lake and swam back as indicated in red below:

Scorcher!

Up in the nineties with heat index of 100+, so naturally a swim was in order.

Forgot my sun blind, so had to improvise:

Parked at 4, walked anti-clockwise, swim route marked in red:

Swimming down Lake Minnawanna

Swim across the lake marked in orange:

Splashing in a weedy lake

A trot round the usual lake route at Holly Rec., to warm us up (it's only in the 70's) for a dip in a shallow (and rather choked with weeds and lily pads) lake:

Here's our swim route (in red, across Valley Lake):

Film review: The Batman (2022)

The high school kids I was teaching this past Winter semester all had very good things to say about this film - some of them saw it more than once at the cinema - so we thought we'd give it a shot, even though it's nearly three hours long.  (That's Seven Samurai territory - and let me tell you, decent as this is (as superhero movies go) it's no Seven Samurai.)  Notice that this must be different from all those other Batman movies, because it's The Batman (all those others must have been "Some Batman Or Other").  Anyway, guess what, it's a dark take on the Batman story, unlike, well, every other Batman since the '60's TV show.  Can't say I blame them, though, they're aiming at teens who go for that emo shit, and the couple of times they attempted to veer from that formula (Val Kilmer or George Clooney anyone?) they met with universal scorn (how dare they not take Batman seriously!)  This one is also directed by the same guy who did the re-imagined Planet of the Apes films, so, if anything, it's a bit more cheerful than those.  We are asked to imagine a young Batman who's only a couple of years into his caped crusading, not yet with a familiar stable of foes, and working with a Jim Gordon who is only a lieutenant, not yet Commissioner.  And yet, he is not haunting the streets of a '40's Gotham, but rather a Gotham of today, with cell-phones and the like (albeit a Blade Runner-esque Gotham, because it's always raining.  And dark).  So yes, Batman as neo-noir, right up to the fact that the glue of the film is sort of a detective story.  The villain is a re-imagined Riddler - re-imagined in that he is not a ridiculous figure in a green bowler hat, covered with question marks.  Also he beats people to death.  In fact, this Riddler sees himself as something of a crusader himself, as all the people he targets are Gotham City luminaries (starting with the Mayor), all of whom he reveals to have been corrupt at their core.  On each corpse (or soon-to-be-corpse in at least one case) he leaves a kitchy greetings card addressed to The Batman, complete with signature riddles.  And actually, The Batman isn't that great at them.  He does get the first one - Q: What does a liar do when he dies?  A: He lies still - but other than that, he needs help, usually from trusty Alfred (played by Andy Serkis, clearly a favorite of the director, as he did the main ape Caesar in those Planet movies) and later even from the Penguin, who is reduced here simply to an odd-looking (Colin Farrell, completely unrecognizable under layers of latex) minor mob boss.  (Embarrassingly the Penguin has better Spanish than Batman or Jim Gordon.)  And it turns out that, rather than see him as an adversary, the Riddler views Batman as an inspiration and fellow-traveler. In this the Riddler doesn't do himself justice: he's far more effective at fixing what is truly wrong with Gotham than the Batman has been, although he does unleash a MAGA/QAnon-esque squad of social-media-recruited murderous copycats, so, you know, pros and cons.  To his credit, our Batman realizes this at the end (along with realizing some important truths about his family) and (presumably) resolves to do better than simply to be "vengeance".  Oh, and there's a sexy apparently bi- Catwoman, who also has family connections to the rot that the Riddler is targeting.  And who also has a seriously half-assed mask:

Pros: this Batman is fairly grounded and gritty.  Yes, he has a Batmobile, but it's just a souped-up sports car rather than a fucking tank like the last one.  And, while he does have a sort of flying-squirrel type thing for when he has to jump off a tall building to escape (in this case, from the cops) but he looks suitably terrified using it and comes pretty much a cropper at the end.  His Bruce Wayne is super-emo - literally, he has a terrible early-aughts hairdo as of a singer in one of the bands that originated the emo label, not to mention he ladles on the black eye makeup when he puts the mask on - 

and he never goes out in public, just sulks around his building when he's not beating up hoodlums (and scaring their victims in the process).  But Robert Pattinson is actually a very good actor, so he does his best with what he's given (which includes some seriously bad lines), and, in fact, all the supporting cast is stocked with solid actors (Farrell, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro (who we've just seen in the far superior TV show Severance), Zoë Kravitz and Paul Dano, creditably unhinged as the Riddler), so it's hard simply to laugh at it.  Overall, it's definitely not one of the most inessential Batmans (and honestly, I was less bored than in the much-praised Christopher Nolan Dark Knight films), and a righting of the ship from having Ben Affleck play him, but...  Probably could've used the three hours better.