Film review: Jamaica Inn (1939)

 

One of the lesser Hitchcocks, this was the last film he directed in England before coming to America.  We'd tried to watch it before, but the version (which might have been on YouTube) was so terrible that we gave up.  Well now they have most of the English Hitchcocks on the Criterion channel, so we thought we'd give it another try (it was that or re-watch Young and Innocent, which is always a good option).  It starts a bit slowly, and I don't think Hitchcock is really suited to period pieces, but it ends up being pretty damn good.  I'd definitely rank it well above I Confess or The Wrong Man or Saboteur in the Hitch rankings.  It is helped immensely by a scenery-chewing central performance from Charles Laughton as apparently buffoonish, then sinister, then evil, then batshit crazy Sir Humphrey Pengallan.  The supporting cast is pretty stellar too: Maureen (The Quiet Man) O'Hara as the plucky young Irishwoman who comes looking for her aunt at the titular inn, Leslie Banks (the baddie in The Most Dangerous Game) as her apparently wicked uncle Joss, head of a crew of murderous wreckers, who lure ships on to the rocks then kill all their crew as they struggle ashore (this is how the film opens, which is a pretty intense way to start any film), Robert Newton (who was the most famous Long John Silver in the Disney version) as the dashing undercover agent infiltrating that crew, and, in a small role, Basil Radford (who I kept confusing with Nigel Bruce), who is one of the cricket-loving pair in The Lady Vanishes.  I have to imagine that this was also a play at one point, as we bounce back and forth between about three main locations, but the sets (particularly the craggy Cornish coastline and the Inn itself) are great, the action is (as usual with Hitchcock) well-staged, and there are several good twists (although we're several steps ahead of the hero, so it's hard to respect him).  Charles Laughton's performance is so strange and eccentric (not to mention his eyebrows) that you can't take your eyes off him.  He manages to be chivalrous and cold-blooded, cool and insane, funny and chilling all at once.  It should be remembered among his great performances, if there was any justice.

Film review: Police Story 2 (1988)

This is, of course, a vehicle for the mighty Jackie Chan, and although the main character is really called Chan Ka Kui, as with all of his films, I think of him as simply Jackie.  The original Police Story is a classic, probably the best of his non-period pieces (although I'm a sucker for Dragons Forever and Wheels on Meals, because both of them have his buddies Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao in them) with unforgettable stunts, like driving a car through (and we mean through) an entire shanty town, and the climactic brawl-in-a-mall, with the lethally dangerous slide down pole through countless live electric wires.  We've re-watched that one several times, but as we were watching this one, we kept saying "I don't remember this bit!"  Not that the sequel is bad - it's excellent (not Project A part 2 excellent, but what is?) but there are long stretches that didn't tickle any memory cells.  Perhaps we saw an edited version?  Anyway, Jackie's back, and unjustly demoted to traffic cop, mostly because of the cost to taxpayers of his mall-trashing.  We think we're going to get a reprisal of the vendetta from last time, as the big boss has been sprung from jail by an oily bespectacled lawyer on "compassionate grounds" because he's been "diagnosed" with only weeks to live.  But, apart from an awesome battle-with-metal-pipes in and around playground equipment, this is a bit of a red herring, as it turns out he really is dying, and rapidly runs out of money to pay the lawyer and his goons.  The true villains of the piece turn out to be a gang of bombers whose (otherwise fairly laudable) campaign of extortion against a large company ends up mutilating the nice secretary of the company.  They also kidnap the (at the time, estranged) girlfriend (May) of Jackie's cop character, played by the slightly-less-baby-faced-this-time Maggie Cheung (not yet the huge star of Hong Kong cinema she would become).  The movie is over two hours long (in the cut they've got on the Criterion Channel, anyway) and there is much shenanigans, including a kung-fuing-and-model-car-strapped-with-dynamite-wielding deaf-mute and a surveillance team stocked with hot-but-lethal babes, who have no compunction in beating up a suspect to get him to talk, leading up to a climax in an abandoned factory in some industrial hell-hole part of Hong Kong, which explodes spectacularly.  This final showdown includes an infamous scene where Maggie Cheung has to run through a domino-toppling row of metal racks of some sort, which the traditional outtakes at the end reveal went wrong in an early take and smashed the back of her head open.  Having not seen this in a while, it was funny to note (a) that the head honchos of the HK police force are all English, and (b) how ugly and shoddy most of the settings are.  Much brutalist architecture, and air of general decay.  Maybe that was just the parts of Hong Kong it was cheap to film in.  In summary: probably the most serious of the three (well, now up to six at least), with May's fight with Ka Kui definitely a downer, and the bombing business pretty intense, but the playground fight is up there with the best action scenes in the whole oeuvre.

Shiawassee Refuge again

I love this place.  It's a bit of a haul to get to (40 minutes drive, middle of nowhere) but it's so nice to be away from all humans in a place teaming with birds, frogs and butterflies.  Frederick patiently indulges me.

Film review: Mission Impossible - Fallout (2018)

Exhausting.
Oh, you want more (he says to his imaginary audience)?  Okay.  Well, I know we've seen others in this series but I remember very little about them other than that Simon Pegg seems to be in them these days.  They get glowing reviews when they come out in the cinemas, almost entirely, I imagine, because of their non-stop ludicrously over-the-top set pieces, most of which involve Tom Cruise conspicuously doing his own stunts (and usually getting injured, now he's in his mid-50s).  So if that's your bag, you should love these.  But, as the OVER TWO HOURS dragged on, Jami and I tried to work out why these were so much less satisfying than the Bourne movies.  (Basically they're American James Bond films - only with constant hagiography of Cruise's Evan Hunt character, rather than the snappish disdain that most of Bond's superiors seem to regard him with.)  Jami's theory is that in the Bourne movies we are in the same boat as Matt Damon's character - not knowing what the hell's going on (or even who he is).  That, and the fact that the characters in the Bourne films are much more three dimensional and complex characters.  Evan Hunt is basically Superman, both in terms of his ability (and the way the world is supposed to depend on him) and his moral righteousness. And his sidekicks all look on him with doe eyes and bask in the glow of his perfection (as well as boring all around them with details of his saintliness).  One cannot help but wonder how much of this is contributed by Cruise himself, who has been executive producer of these films for a while.  Anyway, this goes on and ON, and has at least three scenes where Evan Hunt drives a vehicle straight at an intersection where the cross-traffic miraculously parts just for him and then resumes again for his pursuers, until the climax in Kashmir (that already dates it!) which involves two nuclear devices, battling helicopters and a 15 minute countdown that lasts at least half an hour.  That part is pretty gripping, but it more ludicrous than that scene in Indiana Jones when they're in mining cars that leap from one track and land miraculously on another, only unlike that scene, I think we're supposed to take this seriously.  In conclusion, I'm not a huge fan of Matt Damon, but he looks a lot better after watching one of these.  And Simon Pegg needs to rest up and eat more - he's looking haggard.  (Ving Rhames, on the other hand, the other sidekick, could do with the reverse.  Definitely getting a bit hefty.)  Oh, and I guess that guy who played Superman is pretty good - and sports a silly mustache that he supposedly refused to shave for Justice League, so they had to CG it out at vast expense.  Shades of Cesar Romero as the Joker...

Film review: Ladies They Talk About (1933)

Another pre-code Stanwyck, which also has a review on "Pre-Code.Com".  This one's not as much fun as Night Nurse, but it is almost equally pre-code-ish as it's set in a women's prison.  The film starts with the bank robbery that will land our heroine (who is actually a bit of a hard case) in the slammer - she pretends to be posh and wheedles her way into the bank before opening ours and disables the guard by the simple trick of having him hold her little dog.  She would've got away with it too, if it hadn't been for the sharp eyes of a detective who recognizes her and removes her blonde wig.  However, before she's put away, she captures the interest of a radio revivalist called David Slade (who seems to be simply a rabble-rouser or aspiring politician, but is actually religious) who remembers her from the town they both grew up in, when she was the Deacon's daughter and he was the son of the town drunk.  Well, religion drove them in different directions, and here they are.  Hard-bitten moll though she is, he breaks down her crusty exterior to the extent that she admits (what she had been denying up to that point) that she really was involved in the robbery.  She thought that this would make no difference to Slade, but he reneges on his deal to take her into his own custody (a deal that the DA only agreed to because he has an upcoming election and needs Slade's support - pre-code cynicism!) and sends her up for 2-5.  However, he is clearly besotted with her and writes to her constantly in prison - letters she tears up unread.  She turns out to be well-suited to jail and is completely uncowed by any of her fellow jailbirds, even the cigar-chomping butch who "likes to wrestle".  The portrayal of prison (San Quentin) is interesting: it's racially mixed (and the film vacillates between appearing very progressive and sadly racist (a lot of mugging and implication that black people are childishly superstitious)) and it actually looks pretty cushy - they get their own rooms (rather than the bare cells that their male equivalents get) that they can decorate very nicely.  While she settles in, it turns out that two of the gang she was with get caught and are just yards away in the men's prison doing 20 years.  She is visited by the remaining member ("Lefty") who tells her of their plan to tunnel into her cell (something about fewer guards over there) and so her job is to get an impression of the main key to the cells and send it to Lefty.  This she does with the help of an unsuspecting-but-friendly warder (they bond over their shared Irish-ness) and David, whom she finally allows to visit her only so she can slip the letter to Lefty in his pocket to post.  He does, but Lefty has been arrested and the cops open the letter, find the picture of the key and rush to foil the breakout, resulting in the death of her two fellow gang members and the rescinding of any chance of early parole.  She believes that David opened the letter and swears revenge.  Complicating matters all this time is an inmate who has a crush on David (he is a star radio presence) and is jealous.  After causing trouble for our heroine in the slammer, she gets out earlier and becomes part of David's flock.  It all builds to an exciting climax where she goes to shoot David... and does... but then ends up marrying him anyway!  Stanwyck is excellent as always, and some of the lifers in prison are real characters (especially "Aunt May" who ran a "beauty parlor"), and I like the detective who catches her in the first place and ends up helping her out at the end, but other than that, the cast is pretty weak, David in particular.  Joan Blondell and Clark Gable are sadly missed.

Film review: Night Nurse (1931)

A note about "pre-Code".  The "code" in question is the Motion Picture Production Code, more commonly referred to as the Hays Code, because of the guy who wrote it, Will H. Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) from 1922 to 1945.  He produced the guidelines in 1930, just as talkies were taking off, in response to worries about their immorality, but, confusingly, "pre-Code" as a genre of films covers the period from when the code was written to July 1934 when a body was formed with the will and authority to enforce the code, and films suddenly got a lot more bowdlerized and anodyne.  This film, a starring vehicle for Barbara Stanwyck, but also featuring the equally great Joan Blondell, and as the principal heavy, a mustache-less (it suits him!) and very sinister Clark Gable, is a paradigm example of the genre, not just flouting the rules, but almost using the proscribed behaviors as a checklist.  I don't think I could possibly outdo this review, so go read it (and look at the pictures).  I'll just say that, as I often find with older films, the pacing seems odd.  It's a very short film (hour and 11 mins) but it does drag in places, and the tone shifts wildly.  There's broad comedy, shocking violence, pathos, romance, cynicism, and several very gratuitous (but surprisingly non-male-gaze-y) scenes of our heroines stripping to their skivvies - it's got the lot.  The women are the center of the film, and very much self-possessed, but (as the review notes) if there's a male hero, he's a bootlegger who has a couple of friends murder Clark Gable at the end!  (But don't feel sorry for him: he looks like a Nazi in his chauffeur's uniform, and it's very strongly implied he killed a child by running her over.)  Cue him and Stanwyck driving off into the sunset smiling happily.  Perhaps even more interestingly, the rich people are portrayed wholly negatively, as shiftless drunks who party downstairs while children literally starve to (near) death upstairs.  Timely, or what?  Definitely check this one out - the Criterion Channel has a beautifully crisply restored version.

21 Years Ago Today...

Jami:  What did being a member of the BAA ever get Thomas, anyway?  Here he is, little and hairy (he had black downy fluff on his lower back):

Yeah, I look excited to be having my picture taken after laboring "unproductively" for 26 hours.  After 25.5 hours, the doctor admitted she was flummoxed.  "He should be shooting across the room," she said.  Well, she hadn't met Thomas; if he doesn't want to budge, he doesn't.

Simon: Now he's all big and hairy:

Jami:  Given what a porker he was as a baby (our doctor scolded me for overfeeding him, warning me that Thomas's rapid weight gain (he was easily 15 pounds by two weeks old, and well over 20 by one month old) was very, very bad for him.  Don't blame me!  He needed to eat night and day, day and night, every two hours.  Too busy eating, he didn't sleep through the night until he was 4.  (He still doesn't, but he does sleep through the days now very well.)

Simon:  The cake, alas, was not laced with rum, despite his now being legal EVEN IN AMERICA.  (But it was gluten-and-grain-and-sugar-and-dairy free, unbeknownst to the Birthday Boy, and DELICIOUS.)
Jami: The secret ingredient is 4 brand new duck eggs.  The other secret ingredient is a shit ton of coconut milk--full fat.

Film review: Prince of Darkness (1987)

I have come to the conclusion that the only non-cheesy John Carpenter film is The Thing.  (Oh, and maybe his Spielbergian film Starman - but that's his least Carpenteresque.)  Now, The Thing is an unquestioned classic, with hands down the best practical (i.e., non computer generated) effects ever.  But what makes it non-cheesy (I think) is the quality of the acting.  Nobody's hamming it up, and everyone acts pretty much naturalistically (if that's a word).  I say this for contrast with every other John Carpenter film, this one being no exception.  Now, this doesn't stop a lot of them (say, They Live) from being great fun and arguably even good films, but there's always a slightly amateurish (or, again, hammy) quality to the acting that undercuts their effectiveness.  You get the impression that that's just not Carpenter's interest.  He's more of a 3-D comic-book creator.  Okay, so back to Prince of Darkness.  Let's just say, if The Thing is tier one, and others like Escape from New York and They Live are tier two, then it's at least tier 3.  I'm not even sure I can summarize the plot, but here goes.  Essentially it's Assault on Precinct 13 (definitely tier 2) only with possessed zombies outside the building (which is a church) instead of gang members,* and The Devil Himself in liquid form (I shit you not) in a big tube in the basement, gradually infecting everyone in the building.  The building is a church in a scummy part of LA which is built over a basement that dates back to the 1500s.  The big glass tube full of swirling glowing green fluid dates back thousands of years, according to documents that are translated by a crack classicist (before she gets infected) that contains the son of the father of the devil (or some such nonsense).  This is discovered by Donald Pleasance (game as ever, but you've got to feel a little sorry for him) after the old monk who's been guarding the tube for the ancient "Brotherhood of Sleep" dies and Donald (who's just a regular priest) comes into possession of the key leading to that basement.  He sees the tube and decides that he needs the help of... academics!  So he recruits a crack team of physicists, chemists and classicists and they all move in to the abandoned church, a little alarmed at the small army of homeless people covered in bugs that close in on them as they enter.  And so begins the slow process of possessing the academics one by one (by the means of liquid transference - usually spitting like a geyser into their mouths).  Our (slightly creepy) hero is a porn-mustached tragically 80's-clad cypher (part of the problem with the film) who is one of the physics PhD candidates (and who has the hots for another, the red-headed, voluminously denim-clad Catherine).  Comic relief is provided by Walter, the squirrely Asian (which Carpenter uses as an excuse to have hm tell racist jokes) other physics student (who is a PhD candidate who has nonetheless only just heard about Schrodinger's cat).  Is it good?  God, no.  Is it quite effective as a horror film?  Yes - it manages to be pretty much relentlessly tense (despite all the ridiculous shenanigans and mediocre acting) and there are some undeniably gross images (most involving thousands of bugs - although the bugs themselves appear to be rather friendly-looking beetles).  Oh, and Alice Cooper has a bit part as one of the zombie homeless people outside the church, and gets to have the first kill (by means of bicycle).  For completists only, though.

(*Now I think about it, just about every John Carpenter film has the same device of having the protagonists trapped somewhere.  Dark Star - spaceship.  Escape from New York - a walled-in futuristic New York.  Assault - an old police station.  The Thing - a base in the Arctic, and so on.  It's kind of amazing he never directed a film called Trapped!)

25 Years Ago Today...

...in an almost-empty mall in Redding, CA, Ann Reed (Shasta County Clerk) presiding:

Jami:  I barely remember doing this.  All I CAN remember is that I didn't shower that morning (we had camped the night before and the showers/toilets were completely unacceptable) and so we thought we'd be clever by swimming in the dying lake outside Shasta, CA.  The water level was (at least) 10' lower than it should have been (dry summer, dry winter, dry everything) and we had to wade through deep rotten sludge to get to the lake.  The lake was warm and slimy, and then we had to wade back out through the sludge to get back to our site.  And, so, hot, sweaty, slimy, sludgy and covered in bug bites, we made our way to the county clerk's office.  When I announced that we were there to get married, the two women working there clearly thought we were insane.  "Oh, no," I insisted, "We really are here to get married."  Some farting around that I don't remember, a lot of signing stuff I don't remember, and these pics (which I also don't remember standing for) and it was done.
Simon: our original plan was to get married in a hollowed-out Sequoia log many miles to the Southwest.  We'd seen this chapel by the roadside (presumably the Pacific Coast Highway - or Highway 1) on previous camping trips and thought it would be a suitably romantic/ridiculous wedding venue.  However, when we arrived, we learned that its proprietor was on a month-long vacation, and that the nearest place to get married was Redding, about 50 miles inland.  And "inland" in Northern California, means across the mountains away from the cool, green coast and into Death Valley Desert conditions.  So we were pretty grumpy.  Redding was hit by the massive fires of last year, and I wonder if all record of our nuptuals went up in smoke.

Film review: The Fly (1958)

Somebody on Twitter asked the other day "what was a film you saw at WAY too young an age?"  I couldn't actually think of one (I was a total wuss and would leave the room if a film was scary) but Jami remembered this question when looking for a schlocky monster movie to watch and saw The Fly listed.  I, on the other hand, had only ever seen the (excellent, super-gross) remake, so we decided to watch it.  The first thing to note is that it is entirely set in Montreal and everyone has French names.  Not something I've ever heard anyone remark about it, but it seems noteworthy.  The second thing is that it has an excellent (and surprisingly graphic) beginning, where a factory security guard hears something happening in the steel press room late at night and happens upon a smartly-dressed woman bending over the massive steel press.  She is startled and runs off. He approaches it and we and he see that a man's legs are sticking out from it and (gloriously technicolor) blood has oozed out in gallons.  Cut to... Vincent Price, sitting in his well-furnished office, and his fancy phone rings.  He smiles when he hears who it is - his sister-in-law, for whom he has a bit of a thing.  But she's ringing to tell him that she's killed his brother.  He thinks it's a joke at first, but finally works out that she's not kidding.  Then he gets a call from the security guard, who works for him (and the murdered man) as the factory is the joint property of the brothers.  So: good start!  We have a mystery - why would a wife, who by all accounts loved her husband very much, kill him in such a gruesome way?  (And apparently the press was operated twice, both with the bed set to zero, so it would crush him to a pancake.)  Surprisingly (especially for those of us who think we know the plot without having seen the film) we stay with this plotline for a good while.  The wife, Helene Delambre (well played by Patricia Owens - just as well, because she is, again surprisingly, the focus of the film) is bizarrely calm, and even seems not to recognize that her young son Phillippe (whom Vincent Price takes care of) is her son.  She also seems obsessed with flies - shocking the nurse who is looking after her by throwing herself at her when she swats one.  Finally, though, Vincent Price tricks her into spilling her guts (he tricks her by claiming that he has caught the fly that she's been looking for: with "a white head and one white leg") and will destroy it (makes you wonder why she was upset when the nurse swatted the earlier fly).  We then get the flashback that is the main body of the film, and that is the familiar plot of matter transmitter gone wrong.  Again, though, the action is very underplayed and you never actually see the accident.  In fact, there's no intimation that the scientist (played by David Hedison, one of the earlier Felix Leiters) is even going to attempt it (especially after he's failed with the family cat earlier - one blemish on the otherwise realistic sci-fi surface of the film because when the cat is vaporized we hear a spectral howling as if it has just become invisible or is in the astral plane or something).  Our first clue that something is amiss is because Vincent Price has come over for lunch and he and Helene go down to the lab to get his brother and there is a handwritten note on the door telling them not to enter, and Price notes that his handwriting has got worse.  There then follows a couple of days of Helene frantically trying to find the missing fly in the hope that if her husband and the fly go back through the transporter they'll magically untangle.  But they fail to find it, and when she persuades him to try going through by himself we finally get the moment when he takes the cloth that's been hiding his head off and we see the famous shot of first his fly's head, and then her screaming face seen through his composite eyes.  It is his decision to kill himself with the press because he can feel the fly side taking over, and as it is, he almost drags her with him.  Then we get back to the present and the inspector reveals to Vincent Price after they leave the room where Helene has revealed all this that he doesn't believe a word and he's going to have her carted off to the nut house ("guilty but insane").  And of course, just as she's about to be taken away, the fly is found, trapped in a spider's web, squeaking "help me!"  And it is the inspector who crushes it in horror, and then he and Vincent Price work out what story will get Helene off.  Cue happy ending!  So... is it good?  Well, it's well-written, and surprisingly classy, but it could also be staged as a play very easily, and it's more Agatha Christie than Ray Harryhausen.  I have a feeling the kids would be getting restive.  However, it's the tiny human-headed fly screaming "help me!" as the giant spider starts munching on it that scarred Jami for life, and who knows, maybe it would still have that effect on the more impressionable nipper.

DeVries Nature Conservancy

Still going down the list, and this is our first dud.  It was a 40 minute drive (mostly because it's in the middle of nowhere) and turned out to be an organic farm set in nice countryside where they'd mowed round a couple of fields to make "hiking" "trails".  Still, we drove through the small towns of Corunna and Owosso, which are in Bermuda Triangles that somehow stalled time in the 50s.  Owosso even has a Radio Shack!

Atlas County Park

Next candidate on the list of "best hikes in Genesee County" (according to Yelp): it's literally right across the road from Goodrich High School.

 Wetlands - it's like a mini version of Shiawassee reserve.

 Nice little stroll that - I think we'll put it in the regular rotation.  And (like For Mar) it has a Tiny Library, albeit with slightly more adult books:

Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge

 Tired of the same-old same-old I googled "best hikes in Genesee County" and this name came up.  It's a 40 minute drive, but what the hell.

 Look at us - all excited for our walk.  By the time it was over, we'd be dragging (the shortcut on the map was washed out)

 It's the Michigan Everglades!  Well, it's wetlands, with a raised path for us visitors.  Lots of bugs!

 Very pretty.  Sun-dappled.

 A heron, I think.  There were TONS of these guys all over the place.

 Now we're on the longer car drive round the reserve.  Beware of mimsers!  As you can see, there's no way round them, and it's all one way.

 The Shiawassee River.

Frogs!