Film review: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Watched this one because it's leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of March.  What to say about it?  It's certainly unique.  It's shot like a cross between Night of the Hunter and Cat People (which is very high praise, as both are masterpieces), which is to say that the blacks are all velvety and the shadows endless, but has the episodic feel of an early Jim Jarmusch (e.g. Stranger Than Paradise).  It's in Persian, and most of the characters (all but very minor bit players) are Iranian, but it looks like somewhere in the Valley, and apart from the sort of Chador-cowl that the titular main character wears when she's out and about (although, she wears it like a superhero would wear her cape), nobody's dress looks especially Iranian.  (But then, what do I know?)  Certainly the main male character, Arash, who is unfeasibly beautiful,

dresses like an extra from The Wild One.

Plus, of course, the main character is a vampire, and there is some extremely Morricone-ish music, along with a lot of pop music (and Twin Peaks-esque drawn-out scenes of characters putting on music and swaying gently to it for what seems like hours).  So definitely style coming out of its ears.  But is it nothing but style?  No: it's oddly moving.  Like Let the Right One In, the central relationship is doomed but still romantic.  And, given how silly this could come off as, everybody in it is very good.  The main actor (simply billed as "the girl") has an astonishing face with the most soulful eyes you've ever seen

(which is good, because they do most of the talking).  She also manages to be very scary when she needs to - and there are a couple of scenes that remind one of the Bus Stop scene in Cat People in a good way.  And there's a beautiful scene of her skateboarding down an empty street at night with her cape flowing out behind her that has no right to work as well as it does.  All in all: I recommend it highly.  There are some who will find its pace glacial.  But if you have any romance in your soul you will nor be one of them.  I just wish it had been around when I was a teenager, it would probably have been my favorite movie.  It certainly should be the date movie for every young Goth.

This probably won't mean much to most people, but in scenes like the one above, where she just appears as a sinister shape in the near distance, she reminded me of The Groke, who has a similar sad but sinister affect.

Film review: Knives Out (2019)

We've been re-watching (for Jami) and just watching (for me) the final season of Breaking Bad, so, as you'll understand if you've seen it, we wanted some light relief.  And a funny update on the 70's Agatha Christie adaptations (like the Murder on the Orient Express we watched a while back) starring James Bond doing a ridiculous Southern (Louisiana?) accent seemed just the ticket.

And indeed it was!  This is a very entertaining romp, with some wild implausibilities (a character who literally vomits if she doesn't tell the truth) and a thoroughly rotten rich family with people like Jamie Leigh Curtis having a wild time playing them, and Christopher Plummer as the family patriarch whose apparent suicide triggers the whole thing.  Plummer plays Harlan Thrombey, a self-made millionaire Christie-esque thriller-writer, who has decided that his family's dependence on his millions (his son Walt runs the publishing company set up just to publish Harlan's books, he set his daughter (Jamie Leigh Curtis) up in business, he supports at least two grandchildren's education, one of whom (Chris Evans in a thoroughly un-Captain America performance)

is a no-good playboy who's never had a job in his life) has harmed them terribly and, on the night they all gather for his 85th birthday (Plummer is actually 90!) he cuts each of them off in separate meetings, but does not announce this to the whole group (thus giving each of them a motive to bump him off before he does).  But his real cause of death is revealed to us to be a cover-up (by Harlan himself) for a fatal mistake by his loyal immigrant nurse (the excellent Anna de Armas, who is actually Cuban, one of the few nationalities that (in a running joke) the Thrombeys don't say she has) (another running joke is that several of them approach her individually and tell her that they were in favor of inviting her to the funeral but were outvoted) who mixes up his morphine with his other medicine and gives him a massive dose of the former (that would be the regular dose of the latter).  Harlan gives her advice of how to make it look like she wasn't there at the time of his death and then slits his own throat (with one of his large collection of knives).  Me telling you this is not really a spoiler, either, as this happens fairly early in the film.  She is the aforementioned regurgitative falsehood-avoider, and is understandably freaked out when Daniel Craig's drawling detective (Benoit Blanc) recruits her to be Watson to his Holmes. 

Things are of course complicated enormously when it emerges that Harlan left everything to her.  There are lots of satisfying occasions when hints at later developments are given in apparently throwaway lines, so you can feel clever if you remember them.  And unlike most murder films today (he said, making him sound like an old fogey) it's not unpleasantly gory.  In fact, apart from Harlan, there's only one other death.  Check it out - it's lots of fun - and actually better than the 70s films it's an homage to (right down the font, which looks like the kind used in the 70s on Christie paperback reprints).

New Mailbox!

After about 18 years it was time for a new one, as the door fell off the old one a while ago and our letters got all snowy this year.

Film review: 3:10 to Yuma (1957)

This is an interesting little movie.  It's based on a story by Elmore Leonard (who wrote a lot of Westerns before switching to the thrillers he's better known for now) and Glenn Ford is the bad guy.  The good guy is Van Heflin, who is, to be blunt, funny-looking.  The basic idea is that Van Heflin, a poor farmer suffering through a drought, takes up the offer to escort Glenn Ford's outlaw leader (who was caught because he dallied in town to have a quickie with the sexy barmaid)

to a small town to catch the titular train to a town with a jail.  It's rather a talkie Western, with Glenn Ford (whom I've never really liked as a hero, but who works pretty well as the devious villain (with a soft center)) getting a lot of good lines as he wheedles and manipulates Van Heflin's stoic and decent farmer, who is only doing this to get $200 to pay for water rights so his cattle do not die of thirst.  Meanwhile Ford's gang is looking for him to spring him before he gets on the train.  Initially they are put off the trail by a switcheroo that the (pathetically small and old) posse does, where Ford is removed from a stagecoach and replaced by a decoy, but it doesn't take long for them to locate Van Heflin, his assistant (the doomed comic-relief town drunk, played by another one of those "where have I seen him before" actors, and the owner of the stagecoach that Glenn Ford's gang robs at the beginning of the film (who is putting up the $200). 

(Ford also shoots both his own man and the stagecoach driver dead, so he's not exactly Alias Smith and Jones.)  A solid portion of the movie is spent with our heroes and the villain cooped up in a hotel waiting for the train.  (As Leonard said in an interview that came with the movie on Criterion Channel, a friend said that the movie was basically "3 hours and ten minutes past High Noon".)  The tension is effectively ramped up (as the town drunk meets a grisly fate and every recently-recruited townsperson suddenly decides he has important things to do elsewhere, and to complicate matter, Van Heflin's wife comes into town looking for him).  So the climax (as seen in the poster) is Van Heflin trying to get to the train through all of Ford's gang members. 

This leads to a rather unexpected denouement, that I'm not sure I like but that I won't give away.  (Apparently the 2007 remake is even more extreme.)  Oh, and one important extra point: it has a cracking theme song!

Coronavirus hits home

So: yesterday the first two cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus were reported in Michigan, and today the shit hit the fan.  First Michigan State canceled face-to-face classes for the rest of the semester, and very quickly every other university followed suit, including, finally, U-M.  Right now Thomas is still allowed to stay in his Law School Dorms (probably because the University of Dayton kicked everyone out of their college residences with no warning and the students rioted) but Jami's law school classes are all online, and I have to switch three classes to online.  I was about to give an exam tomorrow, and I'm going to try to sneak round the restrictions (partly because my class is a high school class, and they haven't closed yet, so I'm not going to be forcing them into proximity that they wouldn't be anyway) by taking it in the currently-still-open university library.  Craziness abounds!
[Update: they "talked to their parents" who "weren't comfortable" with me "going against Ann Arbor's directions" so I need a new plan.  Meanwhile Tom Hanks has reported that he's tested positive for the virus, Trump has announced that flights from Europe (except the UK - which is obviously because he wants that sweet post-Brexit trade deal) and the NBA has canceled their season!  Things are escalating fast...]

Last snowy walks for a while?

As Emily is still off on maternity leave, this leaves plenty of days to fill by taking scenic walks, so I've been researching new ones. For example, this one is "Indian Springs Metropark":

Whereas this one is Holly Recreation Area:

I would love to rent out one of these cabins - they're pretty remote.

Today the temperatures are touching 60, so we may not see much snow and ice on our next scenic stroll.

Bernie Sanders Town Hall in Flint

Literally ten minutes walk from our front door. If you ever wondered what happened to all the hippies, they were gathered here. Along with assorted crusties and neo-punks. Doc Martens and Converse All Stars abounded.

Film review: Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

This one popped up new this month on the Criterion Channel, and we have a soft spot for all things Cary Grant, so we gave it a shot.  Mixed results.  It's directed by Howard Hawks and is sandwiched between classics Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, but it's not a comedy. Nor is Grant in his usual urbane urban suit-clad setting.  He wears a Panama hat and voluminous, incredibly high-wasted white trousers for much of the action, and it's just not him.

It doesn't help that it's a long film, the female lead is (a) not very impressive, and (b) doesn't have much to do, and the plot is very episodic.  It could have been better (and it's not terrible - although it doesn't deserve its 100% on Rotten Tomatoes) and it has an incident that seems like its a precursor of Wages of Fear, as I will explain.  Grant plays the head honcho of a tiny flying company based in a fictional South American country, where he ferries the mail and occasionally delivers things to various mining companies, and picks people up to take to hospital.  (The Wages of Fear incident involves flying a crate of nitro glycerin, but it ends rather bathetically)  Jean Arthur stops off in his small town while on a cruise and falls for Grant, if only after watching one of his pilots crash and Grant act apparently callously.  (There's a lot of "the stoicism of men who face death" stuff in this film.) She was in some way the cause of the death (the pilot wanted dinner with her so insisted on landing in fog to get back in time) and later on manages to shoot Grant in the shoulder, so she's a bit of an Old Mariner's albatross in this film.  There are various subplots, such as a pilot who bailed on his engineer, whose brother is Grant's best friend, redeeming himself, and the visit of the woman (a young Rita Hayworth) who broke Grant's heart,

and a running thread of "the owner of the company needs to deliver the mail without fail for three months straight to win a commission" but it's mostly about the relationships among the men.  Grant's sidekick is a familiar face and is very appealing, but it wasn't really my cup of tea.  The role would have suited Bogart better.  Some good aerial action, though.