What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

Rendezvous from 1935 with William Powell, Rosalind Russell, Lionel Atwill and Binnie Barnes


There's nothing wrong with mashing up a romcom with a spy caper; it just takes a harmonizing of tone and style. Unfortunately, Rendezvous' attempt feels more like two separate movies showing at the same time than a well-integrated effort.

It's 1917 and genius-cryptographer William Powell tries to hide his identity from the military because he wants to fight at the front and not be stuck in an office deciphering enemy messages.

Just before shipping overseas, he meets slightly daffy but cute Rosalind Russell whom he tells, in confidence, he's the cryptographer for whom the military has been looking. Having immediately fallen for Powell, Russell informs her uncle, the Assistant Secretary of War, who Powell is, so that the army will keep him near her in Washington.

That sets the movie on a bifurcated course. Powell takes over an Army cryptography department in need of an "unbreakable" code for use in a crucial allied ship rendezvous. While that is handled with spy-war seriousness, the other path of the movie has goofy Russell, ignorant of the importance of Powell's work, unintentionally and repeatedly, messing up his covert efforts as she clumsily pursues him romantically.

The espionage story is a pretty good by-the-numbers effort involving a Washington-based German spy ring that extends to Mexico, a beautiful blonde German Mata Hari who pursues Powell (and infuriates Russell), some neat WWI cryptography and spy technology and a reasonable amount of fist fights, gun fights, late-night secret meetings and double and triple agents.

But the Russell-Powell love thread is, well, a hot mess. Russell plays it like a full-on screwball comedy, silly pratfalls and all, while Powell seems to have intuited that won't work in this movie, so he plays the romcom stuff lower than low key. Whether Russell just didn't get it or she was badly directed, she's never been more out of step in a movie.

Since the romcom sleeve does not work, thankfully, the movie is more spy story than love story. With solid efforts by Lionel Atwill as an unintentionally compromised British cryptographer and Binnie Barnes as the seductive enemy spy, the movie is a pretty good espionage tale.

It's just a shame that the romcom element wasn't harmonized in style and tone to the espionage element or MGM would have had a darn-good movie on its hands with Rendezvous. Instead, it feels as if you're watching a decent spy story that gets oddly interrupted from time to time with clips from a romcom that happens to have the same actors in it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Gotta love those authentic 1917 fashions.

 

[Harp]

^Thin man seems doppelganger to Herbert O Yardley who fathered the American WWI cryptologic
effort then spilled all the beans all over the floor with his book The American Black Chamber which
laid bare how the upstart Yanks had broken all diplomatic/war codes-Allied and Axis. Powell seems a
perfect cast fit-urbane, suave, sophisticate able to hold his own in this particular game.

Roz had it all down in spades on-and-off set. Lousy directing, lack of script sense possibly at play here.
Prescient flick preface to American Second World War crypto cracking Enigma and Nippon's Purple code.
A definite must see if only to catch Russell as ingenue without a clue.

 

[Edward]

Speaking of 'Christmas' movies...although I haven't seen Branagh's Belfast yet I sense this
film has some magic and will become a holiday christened staple.
Belfast featured at the Chicago Film Fest recently and the town buzz is electric.

I'm hoping it streams soon. Branagh may have lost his accent, but he never lost his roots; a lot of his films over the years have been deliberately premiered in Belfast. It'll be interesting to see how he handles this one. For those of us born in the 60s and 70s, the political situation there was an ever-present backdrop; few films caught the balance right, either making it *everything* or trying to pretend it didn't exist. Reality was much more nuanced, of course.

 

[Fading Fast]

Gotta love those authentic 1917 fashions.

While there are exceptions, overall, one thing Hollywood definitely does better today is period authenticity.

 

[Fading Fast]

^Thin man seems doppelganger to Herbert O Yardley who fathered the American WWI cryptologic
effort then spilled all the beans all over the floor with his book The American Black Chamber which
laid bare how the upstart Yanks had broken all diplomatic/war codes-Allied and Axis. Powell seems a
perfect cast fit-urbane, suave, sophisticate able to hold his own in this particular game.

Roz had it all down in spades on-and-off set. Lousy directing, lack of script sense possibly at play here.
Prescient flick preface to American Second World War crypto cracking Enigma and Nippon's Purple code.
A definite must see if only to catch Russell as ingenue without a clue.

I love Rosalind Russell - best performance by a actress in a screwball/romcom of the GE goes to her for "His Girl Friday -" but man was she off the beam in this one.

 

[Harp]

I'm hoping it streams soon. Branagh may have lost his accent, but he never lost his roots; a lot of his films over the years have been deliberately premiered in Belfast. It'll be interesting to see how he handles this one. For those of us born in the 60s and 70s, the political situation there was an ever-present backdrop; few films caught the balance right, either making it *everything* or trying to pretend it didn't exist. Reality was much more nuanced, of course.

When I was a boy back in the 60s on Chicago's southside families were flocking in from Belfast/NI
and me granfar received letters from relatives in NI asking help and sponsorship. Lots of veterans from
the Easter Rebellion and when they passed coffins carried out of Little Flower Church were draped
with an Irish flag. Sister Malachy's sixth grade classroom flush with newly arrived accents quickly
assimilated to surroundings. Interesting times though seldom if ever considered against the norm.

 

[Harp]

This evening I finally saw Darkest Hour, admitted Churchillian homage and well done.

As I have said in this lounge Winston S Churchill cast an extraordinary life
and whatever currency History accords his ghost today is hardly unearned lucre.

 

[Fading Fast]

This evening I finally saw Darkest Hour, admitted Churchillian homage and well done.

As I have said in this lounge Winston S Churchill cast an extraordinary life
and whatever currency History accords his ghost today is hardly unearned lucre.

I'm with you, these were my comments (in response to another post about the movie at the time) when I saw it back in 2018:

I am a big Churchill fan - faults (of which there were many) and all - as he kept Western Civilization upright in its darkest hour (great title) of the 20th Century. And, like you, I enjoyed the movie, but I was frustrated by the fictional details and scenes (the subway ride, the late-night visit by the King, the plan to use civilian ships to evacuate Dunkirk was supported by but not thought-up by Churchill and the movie's day-count timeline was altered) as it becomes harder over time to keep what really happened and how it happened straight in your mind when movies like these weave fact and fiction together so aggressively.

But as noted, I really enjoyed the movie as it was an engaging story, where people take action, choose sides and debate with intelligent dialogue / where the pivotal moments are shown, the boring ones stripped out / where raw human emotions are shown and characters are not all good or bad but grey as they are in real life - and all of that was wrapped inside some of the most critical few days of the 20th Century. Plus the period details were incredible / Churchill's secretary (Rose from "Downtown Abbey") was pitch perfect / and Kristian Scott Thomas was outstanding as Clementine.

 

[Fading Fast]

Just caught the last twenty or so minutes of The Mortal Storm (comments here: #29115) on TCM and now I'll be actively angry at the Nazis all day.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We started a three-day run of "Being The Ricardos" last night, a film that left me irritated on multiple levels.

Let's start with the first -- Aaron Sorkin is a self-important bourgeois twit who's been told he's a great auteur so many times that he's come to actually to believe it. But I have never found him to live up to the hype, either in television or movies. His characters are merely vehicles for talking points, and while an author like Paddy Chayefsky knew how to use such characters to deliver his points in a blistering, unforgettable way, Sorkin's deliver their messages with all the vigor of a think piece in a dentist's waiting-room magazine. There are important points to be made in the story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, but Sorkin makes them limply, by reshaping the facts to suit his narrative, and then dragging it out for an interminable two-and-a-quarter hours that seem like three.

The film concentrates several aspects of the Ball-Arnaz-"I Love Lucy" saga into one single week, which is the first instance of Sorkinesque fact-reshaping. In short order, Lucy discovers that Desi has been cheating on her, as he habitually did thruout their marriage, and then discovers that she's pregnant, and is then exposed as a Communist by Walter Winchell. All the while she argues with her head writer over how to stage a comedy scene in that week's episode. A pretty full week for anyone, really, but compressing all this into seven days for the sake of the story reduces the dramatic impact of each of the stories being told, and forces Sorkin into a clunky non-linear technique that, given the film's lax attention to period detail, often leaves you wondering just when the scene you're watching is supposed to be taking place.

The casting isn't as impressive as it sounds on paper. Nicole Kidman, her botox-compromised features masked by prosthetics, is an adequate Lucy, but has none of the real Lucy's physicality -- you hear about her mastery of physical comedy, but other than a limp restaging of the "grape stomping" scene you see none of it. Javier Bardem isn't quite there as Desi. Nina Arianda is, visually, an excellent Vivian Vance for what you get of her, but it would've been nice to delve a bit into the character's colorful background and give the actress a bit more to do than rasp insults and look aggrieved. The one standout performance is J. K. Simmons as William Frawley, presented here as an Archie Bunker-like curmudgeon with a heart of gold. Simmons nails the character to the point where I had to keep reminding myself what the real Frawley looked like.

The period detail, as noted, is only skin deep, and it's pretty clear that in some cases only minimal research was done. The scene of Lucy doing her postwar radio show is ludicrous, showing her performing without a script -- which, as a veteran radio performer dating back to the late thirties, she certainly knew better than to do, and which her director, in any case, would not have permitted her to do. The scenes of the television show being blocked and shot are somewhat better, but not by much.

The thing that bugs me most about this picture, though, is the way it goes out of its way to paint Lucy as a political naif. Thruout the picture she rejects pressure to say she "checked the wrong box" when she registered as a Communist in the 1936 election, but the explanation that she "did it to please her grandfather" is also a bit disingenuous, given her unapologetic support for various progressive causes from the 1930s thru the war years. The truth of her political affiliation jibes with neither of the stories, but Sorkin finds that truth a bit too complicated for the simplified story he wants to tell. He also leaps from oversimplification to outright fabrication when he makes, of all people, J. Edgar Hoover the deux-ex-machina who clears Lucy in a phone call to Desi during a pre-show warmup in front of a studio audience. The historical Desi did deliver a plea on her behalf in a warmup in front of an audience -- "the only thing red about her is her hair, and even that's fake!" -- but not only did Hoover have nothing to do with that, Hoover actively monitoried both Arnaz and Ball and kept case files on them open until his death. By obscuring the reality of Lucy's actual real-world politics Sorkin does exactly what he accuses Hollywood of doing at several points in the picture -- he takes away her agency, and makes her just another pawn in the service of his own purposes.

There was the nucleus of a really good movie here. I wish I'd seen it.

 

[Fading Fast]

Repast from 1951, a Japanese film with English subtitles


Repast is a quiet but insightful look at a regular Japanese marriage in 1951 and its "small" but meaningful problems. It's almost a Japanese version of a kitchen-sink drama showing that marriage and its challenges are often the same in any culture.

Repast is also, for us today, an incredible window into post-war Japan as we see the Japanese trying to regain a honorable sense of self while reestablishing normal day-to-day lives. All this takes place in homes, literally and metaphorically, built on top of war ruins, as noted by the lead female character.

Setsuko Hara, the female lead, is a young frustrated wife tired of cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and other household chores, day after day. Her husband, Ken Uehara, is a low-paid worker in a finance company whose life isn't much better than hers as he works long hours in a mundane job, but it's Hara who is about to snap.

Uehara is reasonably understanding and kind, and Hara's a good wife, but after six years of marriage, she's having an early midlife crisis. So, she takes a trip back to her parents' home in Tokyo where she contemplates getting a job and, one assumes, a divorce.

Little is said, though, in this very introspective movie where the Japanese culture is shown as greatly valuing an outward appearance of calm and respect, but all the normal human emotions and fireworks bubble just below the surface equanimity.

So when Hara shows up in Tokyo, her family doesn't say much, but occasionally asks about her husband, notes he's a good man and, from time to time, mentions Hara should return home as she could lose him. In an American movie, there'd be yelling, screaming and long angst-ridden conversations, but in Japan, almost everything is discussed briefly in dispassionate tones.

That's it for the plot. It doesn't sound like much, but director Mikio Naruse conveys his message by showing more than telling. When you see the daily lives of Hara and her husband, you feel her exhaustion and frustration and his confusion and hurt when she leaves.

As you watch Hara, day after day, washing, cooking, cleaning while Uehara sits at his drab desk at work, you understand what they are feeling. When Hara goes to Tokyo and sees the nightlife and fun she believes her single friends are having, you get the appeal it has for Hara. But she also has friends who want to meet a man, are tired of supporting themselves and envy Hara's marriage.

The end (spoiler alert) is like much of the movie, quiet but emotional. Uehara shows up in Tokyo, not to force Hara to come back or even to ask her to come back, but to let her know, mainly by inference, that he wants her to come back. It's very culturally nuanced and impactful. When they obliquely discuss their future, while sitting in a cafe, they look like a normal couple casually sharing a beer, but you know their entire marriage is on the line.

Repast works in its low-key way because it captures the true problems of real and relatable people living "regular" lives. There are no explosions, no special effects, no plot twists, just the challenges that a very recognizable couple (even to a modern audience) face in their marriage. Plus, for us today, Repast is an incredible time capsule of post-war Japan.


N.B. There's a Japanese-style Betty Friedan theme quietly running through Repast. Hara's husband is a good man and a decent husband. He has some flaws, but there's a reason most of the wives in their neighborhood are jealous of Hara's marriage. Yet, even with a good marriage, Hara is simply unhappy in the one main role society offers her.

 

[MisterCairo]

Last night, my wife and I were to have seen Ricky Gervais' Super Nature comedy tour show in Toronto. Sadly, his shows were cancelled a couple of weeks back, something about a virus.

So, the family piled into the old family truckster, and we saw Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

We all really liked it. Perhaps a bit slow to get off the ground, but we need to be introduced to the family at the centre of the story. Very touching use of clips of Harold Ramis's Egon Spengler from the first two films, some unused footage, digitally aged and imposed on an actor to bring (spoiler alert) his spirit back.

A dramedy of sorts, it has its serious overtones (based on the Egon Spengler backstory), but lots of the traditional GB comedy we expected.

The intro of Ray Stantz (Dan Akroyd), suggested a story arc to get the crew back, but in the end it was a plot point t to set up the arrival just in time we all expected. Only so much they could have done, all in all it was satisfactory.

Aykroyd and Murray have not aged well. Ernie Hudson looks sharp, and man, Sigourney Weaver is still hot. Annie Pots looks great, but recalling I had a crush on her back in the day, it is tough to realize how e have ALL aged!

I can now say I have seen all four films in original theatrical runs. This may be the start of a new series, ( watch all the way to the end of credits) who knows, but we would welcome another.

 

[Harp]

View attachment 388449
Repast from 1951, a Japanese film with English subtitles


Repast is a quiet but insightful look at a regular Japanese marriage in 1951 and its "small" but meaningful problems. It's almost a Japanese version of a kitchen-sink drama showing that marriage and its challenges are often the same in any culture.

Repast is also, for us today, an incredible window into post-war Japan as we see the Japanese trying to regain a honorable sense of self while reestablishing normal day-to-day lives. All this takes place in homes, literally and metaphorically, built on top of war ruins, as noted by the lead female character.

Setsuko Hara, the female lead, is a young frustrated wife tired of cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and other household chores, day after day. Her husband, Ken Uehara, is a low-paid worker in a finance company whose life isn't much better than hers as he works long hours in a mundane job, but it's Hara who is about to snap.

Uehara is reasonably understanding and kind, and Hara's a good wife, but after six years of marriage, she's having an early midlife crisis. So, she takes a trip back to her parents' home in Tokyo where she contemplates getting a job and, one assumes, a divorce.

Little is said, though, in this very introspective movie where the Japanese culture is shown as greatly valuing an outward appearance of calm and respect, but all the normal human emotions and fireworks bubble just below the surface equanimity.

So when Hara shows up in Tokyo, her family doesn't say much, but occasionally asks about her husband, notes he's a good man and, from time to time, mentions Hara should return home as she could lose him. In an American movie, there'd be yelling, screaming and long angst-ridden conversations, but in Japan, almost everything is discussed briefly in dispassionate tones.

That's it for the plot. It doesn't sound like much, but director Mikio Naruse conveys his message by showing more than telling. When you see the daily lives of Hara and her husband, you feel her exhaustion and frustration and his confusion and hurt when she leaves.

As you watch Hara, day after day, washing, cooking, cleaning while Uehara sits at his drab desk at work, you understand what they are feeling. When Hara goes to Tokyo and sees the nightlife and fun she believes her single friends are having, you get the appeal it has for Hara. But she also has friends who want to meet a man, are tired of supporting themselves and envy Hara's marriage.

The end (spoiler alert) is like much of the movie, quiet but emotional. Uehara shows up in Tokyo, not to force Hara to come back or even to ask her to come back, but to let her know, mainly by inference, that he wants her to come back. It's very culturally nuanced and impactful. When they obliquely discuss their future, while sitting in a cafe, they look like a normal couple casually sharing a beer, but you know their entire marriage is on the line.

Repast works in its low-key way because it captures the true problems of real and relatable people living "regular" lives. There are no explosions, no special effects, no plot twists, just the challenges that a very recognizable couple (even to a modern audience) face in their marriage. Plus, for us today, Repast is an incredible time capsule of post-war Japan.


N.B. There's a Japanese-style Betty Friedan theme quietly running through Repast. Hara's husband is a good man and a decent husband. He has some flaws, but there's a reason most of the wives in their neighborhood are jealous of Hara's marriage. Yet, even with a good marriage, Hara is simply unhappy in the one main role society offers her.

Psychological issues within marriage are intriguing to this confirmed Irish bachelor and I recall
an Army buddy talking about his runaway wife whom habitually left Texas for her family in Cleveland.
My pal brought her back three times, sat her down at the kitchen table and took off his gold wedding
band and placed it down on the table. He would no longer pursue her if she left, and, should she
depart, not to return, their marriage would defacto be over. Not to pitch my own two cents in
but at some point it seems reasonable to draw a line. Japanese culture is more sedate but whatever
society man-woman union demands mutual accord.

 

[Harp]

We started a three-day run of "Being The Ricardos" last night, a film that left me irritated on multiple levels.

Let's start with the first -- Aaron Sorkin is a self-important bourgeois twit who's been told he's a great auteur so many times that he's come to actually to believe it. But I have never found him to live up to the hype, either in television or movies. His characters are merely vehicles for talking points, and while an author like Paddy Chayefsky knew how to use such characters to deliver his points in a blistering, unforgettable way, Sorkin's deliver their messages with all the vigor of a think piece in a dentist's waiting-room magazine. There are important points to be made in the story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, but Sorkin makes them limply, by reshaping the facts to suit his narrative, and then dragging it out for an interminable two-and-a-quarter hours that seem like three.

The film concentrates several aspects of the Ball-Arnaz-"I Love Lucy" saga into one single week, which is the first instance of Sorkinesque fact-reshaping. In short order, Lucy discovers that Desi has been cheating on her, as he habitually did thruout their marriage, and then discovers that she's pregnant, and is then exposed as a Communist by Walter Winchell. All the while she argues with her head writer over how to stage a comedy scene in that week's episode. A pretty full week for anyone, really, but compressing all this into seven days for the sake of the story reduces the dramatic impact of each of the stories being told, and forces Sorkin into a clunky non-linear technique that, given the film's lax attention to period detail, often leaves you wondering just when the scene you're watching is supposed to be taking place.

The casting isn't as impressive as it sounds on paper. Nicole Kidman, her botox-compromised features masked by prosthetics, is an adequate Lucy, but has none of the real Lucy's physicality -- you hear about her mastery of physical comedy, but other than a limp restaging of the "grape stomping" scene you see none of it. Javier Bardem isn't quite there as Desi. Nina Arianda is, visually, an excellent Vivian Vance for what you get of her, but it would've been nice to delve a bit into the character's colorful background and give the actress a bit more to do than rasp insults and look aggrieved. The one standout performance is J. K. Simmons as William Frawley, presented here as an Archie Bunker-like curmudgeon with a heart of gold. Simmons nails the character to the point where I had to keep reminding myself what the real Frawley looked like.

The period detail, as noted, is only skin deep, and it's pretty clear that in some cases only minimal research was done. The scene of Lucy doing her postwar radio show is ludicrous, showing her performing without a script -- which, as a veteran radio performer dating back to the late thirties, she certainly knew better than to do, and which her director, in any case, would not have permitted her to do. The scenes of the television show being blocked and shot are somewhat better, but not by much.

The thing that bugs me most about this picture, though, is the way it goes out of its way to paint Lucy as a political naif. Thruout the picture she rejects pressure to say she "checked the wrong box" when she registered as a Communist in the 1936 election, but the explanation that she "did it to please her grandfather" is also a bit disingenuous, given her unapologetic support for various progressive causes from the 1930s thru the war years. The truth of her political affiliation jibes with neither of the stories, but Sorkin finds that truth a bit too complicated for the simplified story he wants to tell. He also leaps from oversimplification to outright fabrication when he makes, of all people, J. Edgar Hoover the deux-ex-machina who clears Lucy in a phone call to Desi during a pre-show warmup in front of a studio audience. The historical Desi did deliver a plea on her behalf in a warmup in front of an audience -- "the only thing red about her is her hair, and even that's fake!" -- but not only did Hoover have nothing to do with that, Hoover actively monitoried both Arnaz and Ball and kept case files on them open until his death. By obscuring the reality of Lucy's actual real-world politics Sorkin does exactly what he accuses Hollywood of doing at several points in the picture -- he takes away her agency, and makes her just another pawn in the service of his own purposes.

There was the nucleus of a really good movie here. I wish I'd seen it.

Caught ad recently, noted Ms Kidman and made mental note to see flick, now not so sure.
Grew up watching Lucy, and much later fell in adolescent angst with Vivian Vance, a screen siren
who continues her hold with great admiration for her career/personal trials n' tribs.
Read a book about Viv, seems she and Frawley had a bad chemistry and her relations with
boss Luce had its ups n' downs, although overall solid. Would like to see this if only for old times.

 

[Fading Fast]

Caught ad recently, noted Ms Kidman and made mental note to see flick, now not so sure.
Grew up watching Lucy, and much later fell in adolescent angst with Vivian Vance, a screen siren
who continues her hold with great admiration for her career/personal trials n' tribs.
Read a book about Viv, seems she and Frawley had a bad chemistry and her relations with
boss Luce had its ups n' downs, although overall solid. Would like to see this if only for old times.

Like you, I was looking forward to it, but now after Lizzie's comments am meh about it and will probably pass.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's worth seeing for Simmons, but it would be more worth seeing if it was forty minutes shorter.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Blade Runner FC

 

[Harp]

Greyhound. Second World War diamond focused Atlantic convoy duel with German wolfpacks.
Tom Hanks stars as lead commander of an American destroyer, good taut thriller-diller that
easily matches the Robert Mitchum 1950s The Enemy Below if not bests it.

 

[Fading Fast]

Greyhound. Second World War diamond focused Atlantic convoy duel with German wolfpacks.
Tom Hanks stars as lead commander of an American destroyer, good taut thriller-diller that
easily matches the Robert Mitchum 1950s The Enemy Below if not bests it.

On your recommendation, I looked to see if any of the streaming services I have has it, but apparently, it's only on Apple TV. Oh well, eventually, it will show up on something I have. It sounds good.