Delayed Reaction: Princess Cyd

Premise: A 16-year-old girl visits her aunt in Chicago for a few weeks.

 

I'll admit, I get a little scared of LGBTQ movies sometimes. So many of the ones I come across end up being about the worst that that life has to offer, and I'm not always in the mood for hate crimes, shunnings, or suicide. Even though I picked this recommendation up from a podcast host who generally doesn't favor the doom and gloom, I was still hesitant. That's what's nice about coming up with a movie list to see ahead of time though. Sometimes, I just make myself watch stuff and open myself to really pleasant surprises.

 

The movie starts off a little rough. I've seen enough movies at this point that I'm immediately suspicious of any modern American movie in which I don't recognize any of the actresses or actors. And the movie anticipates a feeling out period. That's what Cyd and her Aunt Miranda are doing too: feeling each other out. This could’ve gone a lot of ways, and I'm really pleased with the direction it chose.

 

This is a very generous and non-judgmental movie. It's the simple story of how two people learn from each other and grow into better people. Not in huge ways but in nice ways. Cyd (Jessie Pinnick) gets a better appreciation for art and feels comfortable exploring her identity. Miranda (Rebecca Spence) realizes she's gotten stuck in her ways and becomes more free spirited. On paper, on sounds a little corny, and maybe it is. It's done in a really honest and realistic way though. The movie repeatedly surprised me with changes in tact. Sometimes it was small moments, like Cyd giving Katie crap for thinking that going from South Carolina to Chicago would be a culture shock*. Or, it's bigger moment like Miranda explaining the different pleasures in her life after Cyd makes a quip about her needing to get laid. I loved a lot in this movie, and a lot of it comes down to the filmmakers smartly remembering to keep the movie small. Not in a budget way. Rather, in the intensity of the story.

 

*Reminder to all screenwriters and directors. The south has cities too. It's not 5000 square miles of small Podunk towns.

 

There are a few moment or aspects where it can't help itself from being an indie movie. The movie filming across the street that asks Cyd and Katie to be in the background feels like more of a filmmaker fantasy than a real thing. Miranda being a famous author throwing raging, all-ages poetry circles is up there with the number of people in RomComs who happen to run art galleries: sure, I suppose it's possible, but it feels more like a fantasy. Katie's harrowing experience at her apartment didn't really feel needed, but it really didn't go that extreme either. None of these things really bothered me but they certainly lean into trope territory. The only thing that really went extreme was the story of how Cyd's mom died. I don't think it had to be so violent. I'm not sure what that added that Cyd being an only child whose mom died in a car accident wouldn't've covered.

 

Overall, this was just a sweet, short, thoughtful movie. I really enjoyed how the ending doesn't go too far to tie things up. There are a lot of unanswered questions about where Cyd and Miranda will go from here, but it's nice to know that they have that relationship when they need it now.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: School Ties

Premise: A young man in the 1950s gets recruited to a prestigious boarding school where he hides the fact that he's Jewish.

 

I did not plan for the back-to-back of Au Revoir Les Enfants and School Ties to overlap so much. I knew nothing about the plot of either. I saw Les Enfants because I wanted to check a stuffy European movie off my list and I saw School Ties because I wanted to see just how many familiar actors in medium-to-small roles I could find. I didn't realize that both were mid-20th century dramas about boys at boarding schools dealing with anti-Semitism. In fact. I'd wager these are the only two movies I've seen that fit that description. It was a nice compare/contrast, even if it was accidental.

 

School Ties plays like a movie that was made in the dying days of the afterschool special that fancies itself an Oscar contender. You see, it's pretty melodramatic and somewhat cheapens the issue. Anti-Semitism isn't great. It doesn't feel quite as severe though when it means that protagonist can only go to most but not all Ivy League schools, is never in any physical danger, and isn't breaking any rules by hiding his Judaism. The climax of the movie is about breaking the school honor code. Not harrowing stuff. This is clearly coming off the success of Dead Poet's Society but is afraid to go as far as that movie. I didn't live in the 1950s, so it's hard for me to say what in the movie is exaggeration and what is accurate to the times. They sure lay it on thick with some of the Jew hate. It feels a little cartoonish at times. Kind of like Saved by the Bell using caffeine pills as a stand-in for hard drugs.

 

Let's be honest though, I saw this for Baby Affleck and Baby Damon. Affleck is very minor in the movie (which I knew going in). I've come to realize that Good Will Hunting saved Matt Damon from a career of playing little shits. He still does get some of those roles, but not exclusively. This is more dramatic than I'm used to seeing for Brendan Fraser, a least at that age. I feel like he's going to have a more soulful 2nd act in the 2020s, now that he's finally starting to wear some of his age. I tend to forget how old Chris O'Donnell actually is. Like, it feels like he should be younger than Damon and Affleck, not older. I don't think anyone in the cast rose above the material, and it again reminded me why I'm happy to no longer be in a school setting with only boys. A male boarding school just sounds like a nightmare. Also, I'll throw out that Amy Locane was really lovely in this movie until she wasn't.

 

It's pretty clear why this movie is only remembered for who is in it. Although it's also worth noting that it's the rare writing credit for TV super-producer Dick Wolf (admittedly, less rare at the time). It's an otherwise forgettable movie that repeatedly pulls its punches. The stakes never feel as heightened as the performances. It doesn't use the nostalgia of the era as a trojan horse for deeper topics enough. I'm pretty sure if it cast Skeet Ulrich and David Arquette instead of Affleck and Damon, no one would ever watch this movie again.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Au Revoir les Enfants

Premise: A young French boy attends a Roman Catholic boarding school during WWII that is secretly harboring Jewish students and teachers.

 

I'm as guilty as anyone of being glib about filmmakers' obsession with WWII and the Holocaust. It's annoying how synonymous those topics became with "Oscar gold". Or growing up, I knew that if there was ever a cranky older person in an episode of a show I watched, it would turn out that he or she was a Holocaust survivor. It all became really predictable and boring. The truth is though, the Holocaust deserved the decades of reckoning it received. 1940s Europe should've been too modern and stable for that to happen and on such a large scale. I can wrap my brain around how some of these genocides in third world countries could happen. They are still horrendous atrocities, but fair or not, I can see how the instability and lack of a world spotlight could allow them to happen. The Holocaust of WWII happened in the middle of one of the most modernized parts of the world though. The U.S. has a fascination with it and it didn't even happen to us. It must mess with Europeans who feel complicit in it in different ways.

 

That's why I'm refusing to be cynical about Au Revoir les Enfants. This movie is as personal as it gets for writer/director Louis Malle. He did go to a Roman Catholic boarding school during WWII where the gestapo found several Jewish children and teachers that the school was hiding who they sent to Auschwitz. While this film plays up certain elements, I fully believe the final words of the movie: "More than 40 years have passed, but I'll remember every second of that January morning until the day I die." And I'm sure Malle feels guilt in some way. That's why the "I could've done more" scene in Schindler's List hits so damn hard still.

 

I have a couple foundational problems with the movie. There's nothing I want less than to follow the world of adolescent boys for two hours. They suck. Even something as simple as the one kid licking Julien's vitamin cracker gave me PTSD. I wish there was a way to tell this story that didn't involve me following around these little shits for 1h45m. Once I got past that aspect though and started to see where the movie was going*, I was captivated by the movie. I was especially pleased that the movie didn't get super nihilistic. There's no excessive violence. I was worried there'd be public executions or casual murders like in Schindler's List. Instead, it's more about how people tried to normalize it all and pretend it wasn't happening. The German soldiers in this aren't heroes by any definition but that aren't exactly monsters either. Compared to a lot of people, Julien's (as a stand in for Malle) exposure to the war was pretty harmless to him, but it still affected him profoundly. For a movie that I kept putting off because it looked like a stuffy European movie, I ended up liking this a lot.

 

*I should note, I knew nothing about this going in. I had no idea about the setting, time period, or subject matter.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Broadway Danny Rose

Premise: A low level theatre agent playing the beard for his top performer's mistress ends up running from the mob.

 

Remind me why I've been putting this movie off. I think for some reason, I always worry that I've run out of the good ones in Allen's filmography already. Given that even the good ones of his end up feeling incomplete, when I get to a bad Woody Allen movie, it'll play like a term paper that I forgot about until the night before it was due. However, when the movies are only 84 minutes long, I'll put up with just about any movie.

 

This fits the Woody Allen mold pretty exactly. The movie is super short. The premise is half-baked but fun. I like the framing device of it being a story a bunch of Catskills comedians are telling at a diner. I'll admit, when it started, I thought the movie would actually be an anthology of them all telling shorter stories, but the single story works too. Allen is his typical neurotic self which I enjoy. Mia Farrow is good too. I barely even recognized that it was her. Even when they aren't explicit like this, Allen's movies usually have the feel of someone telling you a tall tale, so I don't mind the non-sensical jumps and turns in the story.

 

This isn't my favorite Woody Allen movie, but it is one of the better ones I've seen. And again, it's only 84 minutes. Why can't more of the "pretty good" and "decent" movies I see be that short? Save 2h25m for the great movies.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Playing It Cool

Premise: A screenwriter who doesn't believe in love falls in love with an unavailable woman.

 

This is the kind of bad movie that plays into enough of my personal weaknesses that the taste centers in my brain act like it's a good movie. That's not even the same as a guilty pleasure. It's akin to using the ingredients of my favorite food to make something I don't like. There we go. Playing It Cool is making a burrito that's 50% sour cream and almost no rice or queso. In the right light, Playing It Cool looks like What If? and Alex & Emma: two RomComs I refuse to feel shame for enjoying. I like RomComs and movies that play with narrative structure. The reason I watched it in the first place is because this is one of those "OMG, this cast!" Movies that I've mentioned before. There are simply too many actors in this I like to ignore it: Chris Evans, Michelle Monaghan, Topher Grace, Aubrey Plaza, Luke Wilson, Martin Starr, Anthony Mackie (an MCU favor, no doubt), Philip Baker Hall, Patrick Warburton. It even has Kyle Mooney in an "Other Guy" role. For a movie that barely got a release on VOD, that's so many familiar faces.

 

I enjoy seeing enough of these actors on screen that individual scenes were often enjoyable just for who was bouncing lines off each other.  This movie reminds me that Michelle Monaghan needs more to do. She works steadily. I can't think of something she's been bad in. How has so much of her career been wife/girlfriend roles? Does she have some indie movies I need to check out?

 

...I'm having a hard time figuring out how to describe why I didn't care for this movie. Because, again, it has all the pieces of a movie I would like. Sadly, much of it does tie back to Chris Evans. He has two proven modes that work for him: jackass and Captain America. He's not great at playing thinkers or reflective-types. His character in Playing It Cool needs someone who is constantly in his own head to the point of being accidentally inconsiderate. Put bluntly, if Evans is being inconsiderate, he knows it. It never looks like an accident with him. And his life doesn't really feel like it's a mess. He's apparently a very successful screenwriter and hardly ever has to work. He's able to do stuff like drop loads of money to attend charity events. The movie doesn't seem to realize how much the audience isn't rooting for him. When he and Monaghan finally hook up, I wasn't really rooting for it. Poor Ioan Gruffudd doesn't even get enough screen time to be an asshole. He's just an unassuming guy who is being cheated on.

 

This movie is a little too full of RomCom touches. Evans plays his heart as a second character standing at a distance. Topher Grace randomly leaves his favorite book - Love in the Time of Cholera - around for people to find. Monaghan buys a card for herself from her father every year because he died around that time. Evans chases heart statues around San Francisco. The movie is a too aware that it's in a RomCom. Oh yeah, Aubrey Plaza secretly being in love with Evans. Evans' grandfather dying in the middle of all this. His lie about charity sort of blowing up in his face. Frankly, I didn't even think Monaghan believed he was that charitable before Warburton exposed him.

 

It's frustrating, because this movie is only a few tweaks and calibrations away from me eating it up. I would've happily traded of some cleverness for sincerity.

 

Side Thought: Monaghan is 5-years older than Evans. I was going to use that as a jumping off point to note a trend of more Romance movies lately having women who are older than the men. Then I realized the first three examples I had were all Henry Golding movies (Crazy Rich Asians, Last Christmas, A Simple Favor). So, maybe it's not a trend as much as a Henry Golding thing.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: One Night In Miami

Premise: Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke all have a discussion in a hotel room one night.

 

I was worried. I've had to talk myself into appreciating movie like Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Fences while I devoured something like Glengarry Glen Ross. I worried that I was a hypocrite, talking about how much I loved movies about "putting a bunch of characters in a room together" then not liking the ones I watched about the black experience. Did a have an unrecognized blind spot? It's really hard to distinguish bias from taste. I try to be honest with myself and not like things just because I should, but at the same time, I would hate to be in a place where I accept that I just don't like the "black versions" of movies.

 

Obviously, my concern is a little excessive. My response to one or three movies isn't going to make me a covert racist or something, but I put a lot of pressure on One Night in Miami. And it turns out that movie works well under pressure. I really dug this movie.

 

This also helped me put a finger on why I have trouble with stuff like the August Wilson adaptations. Those movies feel like people delivering speeches to each other. It's like a series of solos rather than a symphony. The reason I love movies like One Night in Miami or the Before series is because they are about people having actual discussions. The actors are able to go small. Some of my favorite moments in One Night in Miami are when characters wilt.

 

This is a movie about big characters. Malcolm X, Cassius Clay (pre-Ali), Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke are all huge figures and this movie successfully brings them to a human scale. It helps that the movie begins with them all taking hits. Ali literally. The others figuratively - Malcolm's uncertain situation with the Nation of Islam, Cooke with a troubled show at the Copa Cabana, and Brown stunned by a "no n*ggers in the house" rule. That last one really struck me. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop in that scene, but I overlooked that option entirely. Once the men all get in the hotel room, it turns into a really fascinating discussion that touches on each of their careers as well as numerous topics of the day.

 

The whole cast is great, but Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X stood out the most for me (and it sounds like he's going to get the biggest Oscar push). Malcolm is the figure with the most divisive reputation and my god does this movie humanize him. Even the great Spike Lee movie can't help but mythologize him. One Night in Miami has him dropping all fronts. He's a nerd who likes cameras and only has vanilla ice cream in his hotel room. Yet, it's also clear why he's such a powerful leader in the community. Ben-Adir shows both sides in a very natural way. In a lot of ways, I preferred this over Denzel's Malcolm X. Aldis Hodge (Brown), Leslie Odom Jr. (Cooke), Eli Goree (Ali), and all the other non-famous or made-up people are really good too.

 

This isn't purely a "people trapped in a room for two hours" movie either. It moves around a bit. It starts with characters in different locations, even Ali in a boxing match. They go to the store or roof of the hotel at different points. While this is clearly based on a play, Regina King (in an impressive directorial debut) manages to open it up without taking away the strength of these characters simply talking to each other.

 

Depending on how you want to define it, this is quickly either my favorite movie of 2021 or top 5 of 2020.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Escape from New York

Premise: In a not-too-distant future, Manhattan is a giant federal prison and a convict is assigned with rescuing the President after Air Force One crashes on the island.

 

I'm not sure how it took me so long to get to this movie. I've enjoyed similar movies from the era like Mad Max and The Warriors. It's the kind of fun B-movie that I would've found on HBO when I was 14 and watched a couple times. Frankly, I've seen enough things that reference it consciously and unconsciously that I'd basically absorbed the whole movie before watching a second of it. In particular, I think back to the N64 game Battletanx Global Assault*, which I loved and I doubt would exist without Escape from New York setting the template.

 

*I'm really bummed that there weren't at least 2 more mediocre sequels in that series. A late GameCube era version would've hit my sweet spot of decent graphics and simple-enough gameplay before getting Wii-fied with motion sensor controls.

 

So, it's hardly a surprise that I enjoyed this movie a lot. I watched this after Locked Down and it seems unfathomable that this is actually 20 minutes shorter. It sets up the big ask of the premise right away and establishes the tone just as quickly. This isn't a futuristic world I'm supposed to think about too hard. It's the kind of movie that's set 16 years in the future, not to explain all the technology but to explain how things got so shitty. It has some cool visual ideas. I particularly liked the car with the lamps attached to the hood for whatever reason. I love the zany cast. I don't know the exact arc of Kurt Russel's career, but I believe Snake Plissken was quite a turn for him. Isaac Hayes pulls The Duke right out of a great blaxploitation movie. I even enjoy Ernest Borgnine showing up as the cabbie.

 

I do wish the $10 million version of this was made rather than the $6 million version. The cheapness works for the overall feel of the movie, but I can sense some cut corners in a number of places, like Carpenter could only put one crazy idea on screen when he'd thought of three. Or maybe I'm just describing the formula that gave us the less well-received Escape From LA.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Locked Down

Premise: A couple in self-quarantine and about to break up decide to pull a diamond heist.

 

Thanks to Covid, I'm going to have to better define one of my favorite types of movies. In general, I'm a fan of the idea of putting some interesting characters in a room together and seeing how they bounce off each other. It works in mystery movies like Clue or an Agatha Christie adaptation. It works from a dumb action movie like Free Fire. It works for a supernatural romance dramedy like The One I Love. I'm also a fan of limited perspective and/or digital storytelling. Just looks at my affection for found footage horror or Searching. So, you'd think Covid would bring on a golden age of these movies. The results so far though have been very underwhelming.

 

Take Locked Down for instance. On paper, it sounds like it could be kind of great. It's Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor acting against each other for the better part of two hours. It's directed by Doug Liman, who isn't a top tier favorite director of mine, but he is a very effective and versatile director. He could adapt to Covid limitations well, probably. It's a sort of heist comedy, which Hathaway excelled at in Ocean's 8.

 

There's a definite difference between a movie made around standard limitations and one made around Covid limitations. No one wants to look at Zoom meetings. Unless the joke is about the video quality, I want crystal clear footage filmed with a real camera that I pretend is a Zoom meeting. Unless the whole movie is being shot in a found footage style, then I cannot forgive below average picture quality. A non-Covid movie would've actually filmed these cameos rather than get them done on the cheap like this. I understand the limitation, but I don't have to like it. Also, no one has cracked the code of making people stuck in their homes for Covid interesting. Especially when they are really nice homes. I know, all people get bored stuck in the house but I don't want to see it when they have twice as many rooms as I have. There hasn't been enough time to reflect on all this properly, so it ends up being characters having the exact same discussions and observations about being stuck inside all the time. Given that I'm still stuck in my house most of the time and the world is still eerily shut down in a lot of ways, it's just too early to want to see other people doing the same thing.

 

And, there are aspects of the movie that don't work in a completely non-COVID way. The first hour is interminable and meandering. It could've been covered in about 15 minutes. Hathaway and Ejiofor broke up but are stuck in the house together still because Covid happened at the same time as the breakup. They are annoying each other. Hathaway is frustrated by how the company she works for is treating their employees. Ejiofor has an uncertain future because of legal trouble from a decade before. He used to be wilder, and while she wanted him to settle down, she doesn't like him settled down now. It's a lot of them bickering for far too long. It's a really unpleasant movie for so long early on that by the time it started to dig itself out of the hole, the hole was too deep. There's also just a lot of busy details. I couldn't figure out what the movie was trying to do for so long. Ejiofor has his legal trouble and employment problems. Hathaway has her career malaise. She's hiding her smoking. He's trying poppies from the back yard. She had an affair with a female friend the year before*. He's selling his motorcycle. She's secretly buying his motorcycle back for him. He's reading poems in the street for their neighbors (who actually appreciate it, inexplicably). And I haven't even gotten to the diamond heist.

 

*How much longer will movies be able to get away with the idea that if a woman sleeps with a man, she cheated, if a man sleeps with a man, he's gay and cheated, but if a woman sleeps with a woman, it's hot and played for laughs at worst?

 

The diamond heist is what the movie is actually being sold on, which is part of the problem. How many people will be like me, turning it on for a heist movie, and sitting through an hour of a couple arguing about leftover holiday tinsel on the ceiling before getting to anything about the heist? It's a shame too, because I liked the movie a lot more around then. Even when they are still in the house in the planning stage, the movie is much livelier. Hathaway brings this great scattered funny energy. I finally start seeing how the two were a functional couple for so long. It's such a freaking relief when they finally leave the house to pull off the heist. It's odd when they get to these extra-filled scenes at Harrods because I started asking "so this production could get actual people for scenes this whole time?" I love how simple the actual heist is. They don't need to be seasoned criminals to pull it off, and the movie get a surprising amount of mileage out of a joke about no one recognizing the name Edgar Allan Poe.

 

Had this movie been a tight 90 minutes (or even a little less) rather than almost 2 hours, with most of the extra time cut off the beginning, this could've been a really fun Covid curio. Instead, it's really tedious for the first hour and picks up some in the last hour but not enough to make the whole thing worth it.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: I'm Your Woman

Premise: The wife of a criminal goes into hiding after her husband does a job that puts her and her new baby in peril.

 

Based on the poster alone, I figured this movie was Baby Boom if Diane Keaton was willing to shoot her way into enrolling her kid in the right preschool. As much fun as that movie would be, the movie this actually is is pretty good too. I really like the trend lately of crime movies focusing on the wives often kept in the dark. Widows upends it nicely with wives who finish a job for their dead husbands. The Kitchen less successfully tells the tale of wives who take over the crime syndicate themselves. I'm Your Woman approaches it from a less grandiose scale by asking what it's like for the wife who really doesn't know what's going on.

 

While Rachel Brosnahan eventually does get her hands dirty, much of the movie is her responding like an actual crook's wife. She sits at home most days not asking questions. Her husband does crazy things like bring hope a baby he adopted for her since she can't have kids of her own, and when his associates come over, she doesn't ask why he's shutting the doors to keep her from hearing. When something finally goes wrong and an associate of her husband puts her and her son into hiding in the middle of the night, she's rightfully confused. I really loved how much the movie keeps Brosnahan in the dark. Information is very slowly delivered to her. The husband completely disappears after the first few minutes, not to return as some sort of mastermind. There's a whole movie happening offscreen with him and a power grab that eventually leads to his death. And the move is only concerned about it as far as it's tied to Brosnahan.

 

I was impressed with Julia Hart's even-handed direction of this. It resists the urge to go bigger yet never gets dull. It ends up being a collection of adventures - getting the baby, the long drive, the safe house, the cabin, the return to the city - more than a single story. Brosnahan does really well playing off scene partners who aren't giving much back - a baby or Arinze Kene as her very closed-off rescuer - or no one at all. She moves from the 50s in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to the 70s in this, where she fits just as well. It's odd. She doesn't look like someone who necessarily belongs in period settings. I hope she gets a few more chances to be in contemporary movies.

 

This could've been a much lazier movie. Brosnahan could've adopted a life of crime right away. There could've been a convoluted plot devised by her husband. The baby could've turned out to be stolen or something. Instead, it slow plays as much as it can and resists the urge to overcomplicate things. The aspects about her husband's first marriage are a little messy but make sense and feel earned. By the end, I believed where everything went on both a plot and character level. I was not expecting to be so pleased with this movie.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Quick Reaction: The Life of Emile Zola

This is another early Best Picture winner that passed like sand through my fingers. I watched it. I tried to pay attention. But it just couldn't keep me interested. Some of the blame has to go to the quality of the Netflix DVD I got for this movie*. These are not always great restorations. I doubt the studio who released it put painstaking effort into the digital transfer. So, the sound and picture were both pretty bad.

 

*Let me be super clear. I love the Netflix DVD service. I don't think the quality is their fault. I don't think there are good releases at all of many of the movies I get from them.

 

This ends up being another movie that I look at through the lens of WWII. This came out a couple years before the war began. Despite being about France, it doesn't hint much at what's to come. That's mostly because it's set in the 19th century, but you'd think a movie with such a social conscience would find a little more commentary to sneak in. The movie is OK. Paul Muni is pretty good as Emile Zola. It's got shades of the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington sentimentality that the 30s were big on.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Dial M For Murder

Premise: A man plans the perfect murder of his wife and has to scramble to adjust as things go wrong.

 

Because I'm lazy, just going to break this into 3 main points.

 

1) This feels stagy. I wasn't as bothered by the staginess as I am with some adaptations with bigger, more obvious performances, but I could certainly tell this was based on a play. The fact that it's almost entirely set at the apartment gives that away. I didn't mind it that much since the screenplay does most of the heavy lifting.

 

2) We just know too much about police work now. Every part of this investigation would be shot down in court. The evidence is all very flimsy. I'm happy to go with it because this was 60 years ago and it is a movie. However, it sure is hard to look at this with a modern lens. I find it funny how mystery movies have evolved over the years as audiences have gotten smarter. As a piece of theater, the crime, cover up, and how the detective solves it as all very exciting. I love the bravado of telling the audience exactly what will happen ahead of time. First, the husband explains the crime. Then, the friend explains how things could go wrong. Finally, the friend comes up with the exact coverup plot as a hypothetical. The fact that Hitchcock still makes it exciting to watch says volumes about the screenplay and his direction.

 

3) For someone so praised, Hitchcock sure does make a lot of simple movies. I agree that Alfred Hitchcock is one of the great directors, but he sure does have a lot of movies that feel more like curios than films. Rope, Rear Window, and Dial M for Murder are all almost entirely set in a single location and are mostly just discussion. He has more ambitious films too, but Hitchcock's legacy is more in volume of quality films than having a handful of masterpieces. Granted, the Vertigo, Rear Window, and North by Northwest acolytes would dispute that claim.

 

So, excellent movie with some understandable limitations that are in its DNA. And I've never respected a movie more than when this 1h45m movie paused for an intermission.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The World According to Garp

Premise: The odd life of aspiring author T.S. Garp.

 

I don't get it, but I am intrigued by it. I know it's based on a John Irving book although I know nothing about the book. So, I have no idea if my confusion about the movie stems from something in the book or something in the attempt to adapt the book. This is an absurd movie with a fun, offbeat sense of humor. Most of Glen Close's scenes are filled with sly humor. Robin Williams in an unconsciously funny actor, especially that early in his career. Obviously, the biggest joke is the car accident, which is so big that the movie sort of steps on the punchline and delivers it in pieces.

 

I enjoyed the movie a lot for the performances. Glen Close is really lovely throughout, but especially early on. I love her sweetness telling a story like how she got pregnant. I was shocked by how well John Lithgow's character was handled. Nearly 40 years later, Hollywood still struggles to include a trans-character with that much grace. Lithgow isn't playing the character as a joke and the film doesn't include her to be shocking. I wasn't prepared for that kind of performance in a 1982 movie*. And, at this point, anything with Robin Williams is a treat. His death is still the Hollywood death I took the hardest. Simply seeing him so young and full of life in this is so nice.

 

*This is where I feel compelled to say it's a shame it couldn't be an actual trans actress, but I'm grading on a 40-year curve here.

 

I wish I understood the point of this movie more, because there are a lot of elements I liked. There's a Forrest Gump quality to it, except much less sentimental. Garp doesn't travel through as many major events in history, but he does live an active and eventful life. The film seems to have some thoughts about feminism of that era, but I'm not even sure where it actually lands on that. Maybe I should look up the book, but then if that doesn't clarify things, I'm really in trouble.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend