Delayed Reaction: The Wind Rises

Premise: The story of Japanese aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi.

 

This is the last of the Miyazaki movies that I'm in any hurry to see. Lupin the 3rd: Castle of Cagliostro and Conan the Future Boy: The Big Giant Robot's Resurrection are not priorities. Maybe I’ll get to Porco Rosso sooner than later. At the time, Miyazaki announced that The Wind Rises would be his last film. I believe he'd announced that about other movies too, but 7 years later, it appears to be true this time. You can feel it in this movie too. It's the most grounded thing he's made. The only thing actually magical about it is Jiro's recurring dreams. Otherwise, it's a pretty straight biopic.

 

That said, this is still full of "Miyazaki magic". The movie has a dream-like quality, especially when he's at the summer resort where he meets his wife. I like how, at that point, the movie sort of forgets what it's about and decides it would rather be a romance movie. The way the movie ends had me thinking about the Good Will Hunting "I have to see about a girl" ending. It's not the same situation as The Wind Rises, but the vibe felt oddly similar. It's fitting as Miyazaki's last movie, because it spends a lot of time looking back. I almost get the feeling that Miyazaki is saying he would've done things differently. From all indications, he's had a good and long marriage. Not the best relationship with his sons though. I suppose that’s his regret.

 

I guess this movie wasn't incredibly accurate to Jiro Horikoshi's life, and that's ok. This is more mood piece than historical document anyways. I'm certainly going to miss having more Miyazaki movies to discover. Maybe I will get desperate at some point and track those other three down. Or maybe I'll switch to Hirmasa Yonebayashi's movies.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Quick Reaction: Cimarron

So…this movie isn't very good, right? It's one of the first Best Picture winners and it feels more like a Crash (scattered and maybe a little racist) than The Departed (potentially forgettable but a good and enjoyable movie). At the beginning, I kind of thought it was going to be Far & Away on a Great Depression budget. That went away pretty quickly and turned into this decades-hopping movie about a woman thriving despite her husband repeatedly getting wanderlust and disappearing for years at a time. I know I'm supposed to do some mental calculus regarding older movies and how they treat race (i.e. forget some elements that weren’t as racist at the time), but this was still deeply uncomfortable to watch at times. Accurate or not, the scene of the slave boy acting as a fan for the family at the dinner table then falling on the food just made me cringe. In my quest to see all the Best Picture winners, Cimarron will be an easy one to forget.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Player

Premise: A Hollywood executive kills a writer and tries to get away with it.

 

My feelings are all over the place on this movie. Before seeing it, the movie was most notable to me for the factoid that it is the movie with by far the most Oscar winners in it (A staggering 13!). That may not sound like that many, but go ahead and try coming up with a movie that even has 5 Oscar winners on screen. After you come up with Avengers: Endgame (7 winners), you'll run out. Granted, The Player has had nearly 30 years to inflate that number. It's nevertheless impressive.

 

I'm a sucker for movies about making movies. No one without that weakness could love Bowfinger as much as I do. This movie is topically extremely similar to Hail, Caesar! which keeps rising in my Coen Brothers rankings. Where The Player starts to lose me is in the cynicism. It really doubles-down on the heartless business side of things. It's all about a bunch of creatively bankrupt people who make all the movies. Every movie pitch is the same "It's blank meets blank" formula. The movie that gets made by the end loses all the artistic merit it started with. The studio's slogan - Movies. Now more than ever - is circular and meaningless. I'm all for some Hollywood commentary. I know a lot of it in this is true and probably makes studio execs cringe due to how on the mark it is. The Player is missing that last little thing though: love. I know that's corny, but it's pretty key. Bowfinger means nothing without Steve Martin and company in awe at the premiere of the movie. Hail, Caesar! works because it pivots to scenes of actual filmmaking that are magical - the synchronized swimming scene, the Channing Tatum dance scene, George Clooney's monologue. The Player doesn't have much of that. It's the kind of movie you watch and assume Robert Altman never made another studio movie again or took a long break from making movies*. It’s all that’s wrong with Hollywood without the reminder why people still want to make movies despite it.

 

*Instead, he made Short Cuts a year later for a subsidiary of New Line Cinemas.

 

The movie is also too self-congratulatory for my taste. For example, the opening tracking shot is impressive. It has that busy-ness and overlapping dialogue that Altman did better than anyone, yet it also makes repeated mentions of how great opening tracking shots like the one in Heart of Darkness are. Everything in that movies is a wink to the camera, and that got old really fast. The ending, revealing that the movie was the script that was getting pitched to Tim Robbins in the movie itself, felt like Robert Altman calling attention to how clever he was being.

 

This movie is enjoyable enough though. It's got an absolutely stacked cast who all seem to be having fun sitting on the other side of the desk for a change. It's a clever movie (even if it lets you know it too often) and has some gags that will be funnier to think back on than they were in the moment.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Long Goodbye

Premise: A Philip Marlow P.I. story with a 70s sensibility.

 

Paul Thomas Anderson watched The Long Goodbye before developing Inherent Vice, right? It's too obvious to even check. It's like he watched The Long Goodbye then thought "OK, that, but weirder". Because, The Long Goodbye is pretty weird and is itself a response to an earlier kind of movie. It's a Philip Marlowe movie. You might remember that character from The Big Sleep among several other films of the Film Noir era. Only, the story was updated for the 70s and cast a less likely star in Elliot Gould.

 

The Long Goodbye doesn't take itself more seriously than it absolutely must. Gould's Marlowe gives a running commentary throughout the movie of the different absurdities in his day. It's a very unique lead performance. Gould sounds exhausted with everything throughout the movie. I wouldn't say the performance is particularly charismatic, but I did want to keep following him around.

 

I didn't realize that was a Robert Altman movie. I suppose that I can see some of him in the movie, however it didn't have the overlapping dialogue and ensembles that I'm used to. I'm starting to appreciate his filmography though.

 

Another movie this reminded me a lot of, perhaps even more than Inherent Vice, is The Nice Guys. I've said this once and I'll say it again: I think I'm just a sucker for crime stories in this time period; especially when set in L.A. It's interesting to see that this extends to movies actually made in that era and not just films made 40 years after the fact.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming

Premise: A Russian submarine gets stuck off the coast of a small New England community.

 

I enjoy going into movies as blind as I did for this one. I didn't even know if it was a comedy or a drama when I started it. I didn't know release year, plot, cast, or awards attention. I knew there were probably Russians involved. That's it. It's hard to come by a movie like that for me; especially one that comes from my own movie watchlist. And this was a pleasant surprise.

 

The best way I can describe TRACTRAC (I'm not typing the full name) is it's like someone watched Dr. Strangelove then said, "I'd rather make something broader". It's strange to think of this as an Oscar movie, but I'm not against it. That's a really cool Lead Actor nomination for Alan Arkin, in his screen debut. I also didn't realize this was a Carl Reiner movie. It's just a coincidence that I watched this only a week after he died. It was really nice to see a young Carl Reiner rather than the aged one I know from palling around with Mel Brooks or the Ocean's movies.

 

It was shocking to see a movie from 1966 that was so generous to the Russian characters. I was -21 years-old when the movie came out, so I don't have a proper context of the era. I'm used to thinking of that as the height of the Cold War; only a few years removed from the Cuban missile crisis. Nearly 20 years later they are still making movies like Rocky IV with comically evil Russians. However, this movie has the Russians as sympathetic and likable. It's not even like they are oafs. I really didn't see that coming. I wonder if it was really that shocking at the time.

 

This isn't a super inventive movie. It does hit the same joke repeatedly about the small-town people reacting to the Russians. In a lot of ways, this feels like the movie Spielberg was trying to make when he made 1941. It stops just short of going too zany, which leaves room for the genuinely tense moments. Even though I knew nothing bad was going to happen, the standoff between the Russians and the townspeople at the end got me. I guess I could've laughed a little more at the movie as a whole. That's the only thing holding it back from me loving it. And it is a little on the long song. I have very few complaints though.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Spellbound

Premise: A documentary about 8 children competing for the Scripp's Spelling Bee.

 

I used to love watching the Spelling Bee on ESPN (and later ABC). That is compelling TV. It's literally all tension with one huge moment of release at the end. Every single time a kid steps up, they could be eliminated. There are no idols or protections. Everything is an elimination challenge. I love seeing the different strategies of the kids, be it re-emphasizing the pronunciation, checking countries of origin, or searching for roots. The simple fact that none of the kids are older than 8th graders means no one really has poise. They are overcome with nerves. Then there's the elimination. The ding of the bell is so perfect. It's soft yet shattering. I don't think there's a more subtly devastating elimination in any competition. Finally, these kids are genuinely impressive. I can't spell most of those words. I don't know how to figure out the spelling of a word I've never heard of with only a few hints. The only reason I stopped watching the Spelling Bee is because the hours for my job aren't conducive and it's not worth asking for time off.

 

Spellbound is a documentary I've wanted to see for years and have had a really hard time tracking down. It's not a revolutionary doc. It's just 8 short profiles of kids followed by tracking how they all do in the actual bee. They choose an excellent assortment of kids, from the smart kids in small or poorer communities who have no idea what they are getting into to the wealthier children whose parents are pretty overbearing about it. This movie does a great job showing how this isn't a competition that just anyone can win. There aren't spelling savants. Most of the finalists are the result of really overbearing parents and thousands of dollars of training. While this doesn't impact how engaging the actual competition is, it is a stark reminder of how difficult it is to overcome the disparities in the lives of the kids.

 

I think this will sort or come down to how much you care about the Scripps Spelling Bee, but I quite loved this movie.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Dune

Premise: In a futuristic galaxy, warring nations fight for control of a substance known as "the spice", which can only be found on a single planet.

 

Much like the movie, I don't even know where to begin. The original Frank Herbert novel Dune is one of those books that, from the moment it was published, someone has been trying to crack the code to adapt to a movie. While I haven't read the book, from the little I know, I can see why they'd want to adapt it. The world of the novel is very compelling. Time and time again we've seen that creating a universe is the most difficult part of blockbuster franchise filmmaking. That's why wells like Star Wars, Star Trek, or the MCU have been dipped into so often rather than creating something original. Even watching this movie, I can imagine a world where there's a half dozen movies set in the Dune universe that all rank as the top 2 or 3 movies of the years they were released. 

 

Alas, the trouble of worldbuilding is that people don't like exposition dumps nor do they like not knowing what's going on. This movie is pretty dense. It spends a lot of time explaining things, and it took me a while to determine if I was interested enough to care about what they were explaining. That’s a bad place to be in when watching a movie. It really is edited with that hacksaw approach where you can tell there's all sorts of complexities they had to leave out. I'm not sure I wanted a 3.5-hour version of this movie - that's would've been painful - but I'm sure that version would've been better.

 

There's also the fact that I'm not much of a David Lynch fan to begin with. I'm not great with the kind of movie he excels at. The kind where people say "Don't worry about figuring out what's happening. Just experience it". To his credit though, the Lynchian touches in this are the best things about it: stuff like the aesthetic and stilted performances. This isn't a David Lynch movie though. It's obvious the producers and studios stepped in at some point, presumably when they realized who they hired and saw what kind of movie he was making. 

 

Just in case I haven't made this clear, I didn't like this movie. I see the appeal of the book. I even see some of the cult appeal of this movie. I mainly see the flaws though. I'm super looking forward to Denis Villeneuve's attempt at it later this year, because all the raw parts are there.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Ikiru

Premise: After finding out he only has a few months to live, an old man commits his final months to building a park. 

Kurosawa really was allowed to do anything, wasn't he? He's sort of the Japanese Hitchcock in that he'd get to turn any "gimmick" into a full movie. For Hitchcock, it was "shoot a movie to look like a single shot" or "the whole story plays out from what a guy can see out his window". For Kurosawa, it was "tell the same story from numerous perspectives" or "what if Macbeth, but in feudal Japan?". I'm really coming to understand why Kurosawa is one of the cinematic masters. It's not even that he makes great movies. Rather, it's that he has great ideas. Whenever he made a new movie, it's like a new avenue of filmmaking opened up. 

Ikiru has a bit of a two halves problem. It's similar to how I felt about Paris, Texas. The first half, I didn't care for. The second half I loved, but I'm not sure the second half works without the time spent in the first half. Weirdly, I liked the bureaucracy the best, like the very long scene about people being sent from department to department. When the movie is about Kanji Watanabe exploring the Tokyo nightlife or having the non-romance relationship with Toyo, I didn't care much. I feel like 40% of those scenes were close ups of Takashi Shimura looking incredibly sad. Where the movie strongly picks up for me is when the bureaucrats argue at his wake about why he built the playground, how he did it, how much he was really responsible for it, and what it says about them that they haven't done something like that. It turns into a mix of Citizen Kane and a carpe diem movie, which is a sweet spot for me. This immediately jumped to #2 on my Kurosawa list behind Rashomon, and I could see it growing on me even more over the years. I may even like the early parts better. 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Serpico

Premise: A New York City officer goes undercover to expose corruption in the police department.

I was going to start this off by saying that I haven't seen that many Al Pacino movies. Then I looked at the list and realized that's a big lie. I've seen a bunch of Al Pacino movies. Other than The Godfather movies though, I haven't seen much young Al Pacino. By the time I really check in with him, it's when he's starting to lose it in Scarface or had given into hamming it up in Scent of a Woman. I think of performances like Glengarry Glen Ross or Heat as surprises, not the expectation. What I'm missing is more of the Pacino of Dog Day Afternoon, The Panic in Needle Park, or Serpico. I look at The Godfather as its own thing. While Pacino is great in it, he's giving a Coppola performance, not a Pacino performance. Serpico is a Pacino performance. I'm not even sure that I liked the movie that much, but Pacino sure is mesmerizing. There's that charisma I'm always hearing about. He's playing big, but not for the audience. This movie did more than anything I've seen to explain why people used to be so excited about him; why he was a go-to name when people listed great actors.

The movie itself is fine, I guess. Certain things haven't aged that well. This isn't the best moment for me to catch anything with police brutality. It was easy for me to lose track of the exact mechanics of Serpico's investigation. I fully didn't realize 12 years passed in the movie. That probably would've helped to realize a little earlier.

Side Thought: I tend to forget how dirty New York was. I mean, it still is in a lot of ways, but 1970s New York was a special kind of dirty. Even new things somehow looked run down. I could barely live in this movie for 2 hours. I'm not sure how people lived there for real. Granted, this isn't trying to paint a picture of the pretty New York.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Witness for the Prosecution

Premise: An older English barrister takes on the case of a man accused of murder.

Courtroom dramas age the poorest of nearly any genre; unless you are able to turn off that key corner of your brain. Thanks to decades of legal shows, not to mention increasingly in-depth true crime documentaries, audiences now have a better bullshit meter when it comes to this genre than ever. Mix that with the fact that, as technology has improved, our understanding of what "sufficient evidence" is has advanced, and it's hard for any courtroom drama to really work after maybe a decade or two*. Something like My Cousin Vinny holding up pretty well after 30 years is more the exception than the rule.

*Yes. I know there were always contemporary lawyers who watched these movies and complained about the inaccuracies. I'm thinking more about general audiences though.

So, I watch something like Witness for the Prosecution and it's hard for me to get sucked into the case. I spent too much of the trial noticing inconsistencies or fixating on the flimsiness of the evidence. There's also the fact that in the nearly 100 years since Agatha Christie wrote the story, they've made every variation of this story before so that it's impossible to surprise me. I audibly laughed when this movie ended with a plea not to spoil the ending. By today's standards, that's not much of a twist. I believe it was at the time though. Audiences evolve. That's a fact that older movies (and all older media really) have to contend with.

The way to get around this problem is to have something else to offer. Normally, that's the performances. I really enjoyed the characters in this movie. Charles Laughton's Sir Wilfrid Robarts is delightfully full of tics and nastiness. I really enjoy how much he bickers with his nurse (Elsa Lanchester). He's always scheming to get around her watchful eye and even in the most dramatic moments of the trial, he seems equally concerned with proving that he's taking his medicine. These are characters I'd follow around for numerous trials.

I'm not great at turning off the part of my mind needed to appreciate this as a classic*, but I'll say it's certainly a very enjoyable Agatha Christie adaptation and more entertaining than a lot of movies I see from that era.

*AFI certainly thinks it's a classic, calling it the 6th best American Courtroom Drama.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend