I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(me) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad. Or, maybe not so bad. Enh, whatever. It's what we do.
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Fire Island (2022, d. Andrew Anh - Disney+)
Gay romance is still a burgeoning force in mainstream media, and one that it seems Hollywood is still only backing with trepidation, as if they don't truly believe there's an audience for it. Recent years have seen a few big moves, with
Love, Simon, and
Call Me By Your Name, and holiday romances like
Dashing in December, Single All the Way and
Happiest Season. But this year the torch has been lit for gay romcoms with the theatrical release of Billy Eichner's
Bros and
Fire Island being released on Disney+.
Fire Island shot out like a signal flare announcing the arrival of comedian Joel Kim Booster as a force to be reckoned with. Writing and starring in this wreckingly funny and fiercely gay romantic comedy that takes its inspiration from Pride and Prejudice, no less, Booster draws from his own emotional well for his portrayal of Noah, the super-hot underemployed late-20something himbo who is still figuring out his place in the world. With his regular gang of multicultural friends, they take their annual trip to the Fire Island Pines only to discover that it may be their last trip as they know it. Noah makes it his mission to get his best friend Howie (Bowen Yang) laid, and vows not to have sex until he does. Meanwhile he keeps having heated run-ins with Will (Conrad Ricamora) who is a very successful individual with poor social skills, and while the personality clashes is what draws them to each other, the class differences keep coming between them.
Booster commands this film from moment one, with voice-over narration, with his body, and everything in between. He's in full control of Noah, attempting to act dumber and more vacuous than he is because it lessens the expectations others have for him, and by proxy what he expects for himself. Yang's Howie is riddled with self-consciousness made worse by his utterly shredded and confident BFF not understanding the differences between them. That they're both Asian-American and gay has its own deeply rooted impact on their senses of selves and, despite being a commonality, they deal with the prejudice and the complex it manifests quite differently. Fire Island is exceptionally smart and insightful, with richly drawn characters, and explosively funny situations that never get too unbelievably outlandish. I quite loved it.
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The Conjuring (2013, d. James Wan - Tubi)
I knew James Wan from his incredibly proficient and joyously outlandish
Aquaman and
Furious 7, but I had kind of passed over his horror stuff (I think I watched
Saw in bits and pieces once). But after last year's very, very wild
Malignant, I realized that maybe Wan's horror keyed more into a comic-book sensibility than a grue and gore one. A friend had been trumpeting the greatness of the Conjuring series and I made a point to catch the first one once it hit a streaming service again (who knew that would be Tubi). Long story short, I liked it immensely.
Wan's incredibly smart set-up for the film builds a whole universe around paranormal investigator couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) and he wants you to be aware of it. They have a past, they have a "treasure room", they have traumas, and they have a child which makes them vulnerable. Lorraine has some form of clairvoyance which is more burden than superpower. They are sought out by a family experiencing increasingly bizarre and threatening phenomena in their new farm home, including the seeming possession of their daughter.
The film is as much a procedural as it is a horror film. It follows the family and really leans into the intensity of the spooks and chills they experience, but it's the Warrens, their process, their crew, their affiliation with the police and their challenging of the evil that engaged me the most. It taps into a more grandiose look at the supernatural that feels especially heightened, as if the Warrens were John Constantine's parents or something. Even though I know a whole massive franchise of films had already been built out of this one film, one could sense that there were a whole franchise of films ready to be built out of what Wan constructed here. Pretty great.
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RRR [aka Rise, Roar, Revolt] (2022, d. S.S. Rajamouli - Netflix)
One of the complaints levelled against
Black Panther and its sequel is that for all its anti-colonialism stance, there's not really actually any fighting and/or killing of white oppressors.
RRR, the epic international smash hit action film from India, has no such qualms.
The most expensive Indian-made film yet, RRR is set in the 1920s during the British rule of the Indian subcontinent. A British administrator and his wife (Ray Stevenson and Alison Doody) abduct a young girl skilled at henna from a village for their own private amusement. The village protector, Khomaram (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.), takes on the mission of retrieving the girl. The admin is warned of a possible threat, and they task the ambitious officer Raju (Ram Charan) with quashing the threat. Raju infiltrates some anti-colonialist groups and catches the attention of Khomaram. The two forge an unlikely friendship, built on lies, but built all the same.
You would think that the film would be leading to Raju's betrayal of Khomaram, but it's really the middle of the second act with Raju's redemption arc rounding out the rest of the act, before leading into an all-out assault on the administrator in the third act, and there's no holding back.
RRR is a big, brassy, playful movie that deals almost exclusively in big swings and going over-the-top. It is dealing with a particularly fraught time in India's history, and it's dealing with it in a fanstatical way, a way that is more than just revisionist history, it's superhero fan fiction. The action goes huge, beyond insane a times, circling past ridiculousness and back into awesome territory. But it's also a heart-swelling, chest-thumping good-guys-vs-bad-guys story that's really quite simple to get behind, and yes, the pink skins are without a doubt the bad guys that you actively are rooting against. That the bromance is so loaded with homoerotic undertones is just kind of a bonus, with no painful machismo trying to disguise it. These two men love each other, and will go to such extremes for one another. It's a romp.
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Fighting With My Family (2019, d. Stephen Merchant - Amazonprime)
Prior to being cast as the new Black Widow, I didn't really know Florence Pugh from a hole in the ground. I hadn't really taken note of her in anything in particular and didn't really have much of an opinion on her replacing Scarlett Johansson (except to say that as thoroughly decent a job as ScarJo did as Black Widow, I still never quite felt she sold the "most dangerous woman on the planet" vibe). Smash cut past a couple appearances as Yelena in
Black Widow and
Hawkeye and
Midsommar, I can say I'm quickly a fan. She is an incredibly compelling actress, always working on multiple different levels at the same time. She's an incredibly physical performer, as well as one of the most expressive actors of her generation.
Even still, a WWE-produced wrestling biography? Sure, it's got a pretty great cast (with Nick Frost and Lena Hedy as the British wrestling family patriarch and matriarch), and yeah, Stephen Merchant has proven himself over and over as a smart, funny writer (if not as known for his directing), but why? What makes this story any more compelling than any other wrestler trying to make it?
The answer is, it's got Stephen Merchant at the helm and it stars Florence Pugh. It's not that this story couldn't have been made without them, but it'd be much less of a thing. It adeptly presents us with a close-knit wrestling family, the resentment that comes as a result of Saraya being picked for WWE training and not brother Zak, and the tribulations one so young has to face leaving home for an entirely new world. It's a ridiculously cliche-filled tale, but one that has the truth to back it up, making it shockingly fresh. Pugh just owns the screen every second she's on it, in full command. It's the movie that made me realize I would watch her in pretty much anything.
(We agree)
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The Great Race (1965, d. Blake Edwards - Criterion Channel)
Until a few months ago, I wasn't even aware this movie existed. It's a strange miracle of a production that is quite surely part of an era of cinematic excesses, but results in not another long, sandy Biblical/Historical epic or series of fanciful song-and-dance extravagances, but instead something particularly unique: a living cartoon.
Many filmmakers have tried over the years to make live action cartoons, mostly by taking a cartoon property and trying to replicate it in live action. The 90's were rife with these - The Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle, Yogi Bear - but none really all that successful, mainly because we have actual cartoons to compare them to. They're not films that are innovating but rather emulating.
The Great Race was inspired by an actual New York to Paris race in 1908, as well as director Blake's love of slapstick comedy of Laurel and Hardy and the Mark Brothers. But the result feels less like an homage to cinematic classic comedy than the live action embodiment of Jay Ward Productions cartoons (The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show). Jack Lemmon plays, Professor Fate, a literal moustache-twirling mad scientist villain in the Snidely Whiplash mold, with Peter Falk playing the more sensible, yet dutiful sidekick, Max. Everything Professor Fate and Max do is to get the better of his rival, The Great Leslie, which finds Tony Curtis at his most square-jawed, draped in the whitest of whites, the most manicured nails and primped hair, and a smile that literally gleams. The Great Leslie is the epitome of the cosmopolitan hero, the flawless man, an adventurer so great at adventuring he never gets dirty. It's clear why Professor Fate hates him so, but Fate's every effort to undermine Leslie backfires on him in spectacular fashion. So rather than attack him directly yet again, he sets out to best him at his own game, by beating him in a race around the world. I think worse for ware is Leslie barely even notices Fate, so all of Fate's actions tend to come across as a desperate cry for attention.
This battle of machismo is interrupted by Natalie Wood's Maggie DuBois, who could have just been the token damsel, but Blake and screenwriter Arthur C. Ross make Maggie a modern woman, a suffragette of the era, but also a 60's feminist, drawn in the mould of Nora Charles, a woman who can talk her way into (and out of) pretty much anything. Maggie is an aspiring reporter who talks her way onto the newspaper staff, and just as quickly onto the assignment of covering The Great Race by entering herself into it, and then managing to still carry on when she quite reasonably shouldn't continue.
The race takes the quartet of Leslie, Fate, Maggie and Max (as most of the other competitors do not last long) to curiously entertaining places, and, at one point, forces them to all come together to survive on an ice floe when crossing from Alaska to Russia. The film is perhaps over-extended by its third act, making a detour in the small European kingdom of Carpania, where the perpetually soused crown prince (Jack Lemmon in a second, utterly delightful role) is plotted against, as his backstabbing consorts seek to use Fate's uncanny similarity to undermine the crown. It's at once an utterly unnecessary yet thoroughly entertaining diversion in this 2 1/2 hour film, one that culminates in a ludicrously epic technicolor pie fight (you might be thinking "you've seen one pie fight, you've seen them all"...trust me, if you haven't see this pie fight you just don't know how epic a pie fight can get).
I watched Star Wars about 100 times as a kid. Had I known about The Great Race I probably would have watched it just as much. It's a delight from moment one (perhaps the funniest credits sequence besides Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and features a delightful Henry Mancini score.
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He Laughed Last (1956, d. Blake Edwards - Criterion Channel)
While I've never been much of a fan Edward's various Pink Panther movies, after the joy of The Great Race I thought I'd second visit into Blake Edwards territory. He Laughed Last is one of his earliest films, and at 75 minutes, it feels interminably long, an elastic of an idea stretched as far as it can go, neither breaking nor returning to shape.
Who is this film's protagonist? The first 20 minutes are completely stolen by Big Dan (played by Fred Flintstone himself Alan Reed) who dies way too soon. He bequeaths his criminal empire to Rosie (Lucy Marlow), who was just a showgirl at the club Big Dan took a liking to. This puts her at odds with dopey wannabe mobster Max (Jesse White) who has aspirations of his own. We spend far too much time with Max and his lame scheming to the detriment of making much of a character out of Rosie, the ostensible protagonist,
That Rosie gets left all of Big Dan's estate makes thing difficult with her cop boyfriend Jimmy (Richard Long). But we don't really get much hijinks of out-of-her-depth Rosie trying to run the mob operation, most of her scenes deal with her toxic relationship with Jimmy...such a bad relationship.
Marlow is delightful as Rosemary in a turn-on-a-dime performance where she goes from ditsy to swooning to tough-talking in seconds. It would have been far better were the film more focused on Rosie and we could have gotten more Marlow. It's pretty hollow otherwise. It feels every inch like a studio-demanded production: "We've got this girl Marlow that we want to make a star, but we don't trust her yet, so don't focus too much on her. Build the picture around her, but let our stable boys like Reed and White do all the heavy lifting We got this crooner, Frankie Laine signed up, but he's a crap actor, but the dames love his, so make sure he's in here, but mostly singing, not talking. Bring it in over 70, but under 80, you got two weeks."
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Damn Yankees (1958, d. George Abbott and Stanley Donen - Tubi)
You know,
Damn Yankees is one of those titles that has been circling around me my whole life, but I never really stopped to inquire about it. I kind of knew it was a movie that may or may not have been derived from a musical, or stage production of some kind. I think I assumed it was about the Civil War, but I just didn't know.
I've gotten more appreciative of musicals in general and having explored Bob Fosse's repertoire this past year, I was curious to see Gwen Verdon in the flesh (as opposed to being portrayed by Michelle Williams), so I dove into Damn Yankees and was shocked to find it was a basesball musical about a deal with the devil. I honestly didn't see that coming at all.
It's a trifle of a story, a flittering whimsy about wish fulfillment. An average middle-aged schlub, Joe Boyd (Robert Shafer) is tired of seeing his beloved Washington Generals lose and so he makes a deal with the devil (Ray Walston) to become the pro-slugger that he always wished he could be, and he's turned into the young, strapping, toe-headed Tab Hunter, under the guise of Joe Hardy. In doing so, he leaves his "old girl", his wife Meg (Shannon Bolin) behind.
He has immediate and massive impact on the success of the Generals, fame and glory are his, but he starts to miss his "old girl", and goes back to see how Meg is doing. Joe's pining for his "old girl", who he made an armchair widow neglecting her for basesball 6 months out of every year, threatens his deal with the devil, and so the devil sets his right hand temptress, Lola, on Joe. Meg, meanwhile, seems to have no inner life. Her husband just up and disappeared and she's just putting up a brave front. Then when Joe Hardy, the new most famous person in town comes and rents a room from her, neighbours begin to talk (if only the story delved into actual conceits of infidelity, with Joe being tempted by Lola, or Meg being very attracted to young Joe....)
But Joe is a good old boy, and in the end, he doesn't want his dreams, just the comfort of the woman he loves, leading to a most bizarre final shot of Shafer and Bolin embracing while behind them Walston jumps up and down in a tantrum that is direly undignified.
The story doesn't really delve too deeply into any internal conflict. It's not really a look at "settling down" or "lost dreams" or the "seven-year-itch" or any of that. It doesn't really ever let Joe revel in his successes, and it never lets us even imagine that he's going to stick with his new life. Almost immediately he wants to return to his old one. He's not even really tempted by Lola, and the production has to do a lot of summersaults in order to make you think the devil might actually win.
I didn't really care for any of the songs (though it was good to finally put classics like "(You Gotta Have) Heart" and "Whatever Lola Wants" in context) and the dancing (for someone who doesn't have much appreciation for it) was fine, sometimes really great (particularly during Two Lost Souls). Yet, despite my griping, I did quite enjoy it. Verdon, a handsome woman with a dynamic form and huge presence, is easily the stand-out performer of the piece. I just think there's more possibility in the story than was actually executed.
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Confess, Fletch (2022, d. Greg Mottola - rental)
It's been a long, long road to getting a new adaptation of Gregory Macdonald's "Fletch" series, with many, many false starts (I recall a Kevin Smith-helmed, Jason Lee-starring Flech being positioned back in the early 2000's). Much of the old Chevy Chase
Fletch has aged poorly, and
Fletch Lives was always an abomination (like 20 novels to adapt and they went with an original story?)
But a new feature from Superbad and Adventureland's Greg Mottola starring Jon Hamm in the title role seems like a natural, sure-fire can't-lose starter to a new, better run of Fletch movies. However, the studio behind it, Miramax (wait, that still exists?), via Paramount, did very, very little to promote the film. I only heard about it from Jon Hamm appearing on a podcast. And by all accounts it sounds like Paramount even buried the film on their Paramount+ streaming service. It's baffling as to why there was so little confidence in the film. Did nobody at Paramount watch it? It's great!
Confess, Fletch is one of the most delightful movie experiences of 2022, with Jon Hamm playing the overconfident, utterly affable Irwin M. Fletcher, former investigative reporter-turned-golddigger/private investigator. He arrives at his rental home in Boston only to find a dead body in the place. With all the casualness of ordering a pizza, he calls the police (not 9-11) and informs them that a crime has been committed, and he grabs a drink, takes his shoes off, and puts his feet up and waits.
Hamm is a devastatingly handsome man which is only made more potent by his lack of ego and unfailingly playful comedic personality (he's been very entrenched in the L.A. comedy scene for decades, despite not being a comedian, improviser or sketch performer himself). He's had some incredible comedic turns playing vainglorious idiots and clueless buffoons in Bridesmaids, 30 Rock and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but no role has seemed so perfect for him to capitalize upon everything he brings to the table as Fletch. Hamm's Fletch struts around the world not as if he owns it, but as if he's immune to it. He's teflon, and nothing bad can ever stick to him. He thinks himself clever, and he is, just not as clever as he thinks he is, to the point that for all his swirling machinations in Confess, Fletch none of it actually truly matters, and even his solving of the crime is more about his refusal to not interfere in things than it is his deductive ability. Fletch skates through life as an only a super-handsome white guy can, on a cloud of unearned privilege that gives him the benefit of the doubt...or would have 30 years ago. Today, Fletch is challenged about his privilege at every turn, though he barely clocks it. He's not an offensive product of white privilege, as he does, for the most part, try to use it for good, yet Mottola is very savvy in how the lens captures the world's around Fletch's awareness of it.
On top of being so, so good looking, Hamm is also aging without fear, and even that is brought into his performance of Fletch. He's too old to relate to the youth, but not too old as to not try. His position as a post-Boomer/pre-Gen Xer means he's not old enough to be given a free pass for his transgressions against a changing society, but he's also old enough to not be self conscious about it. It's like he knows the world is still his oyster, he may never get the pearl, but it's always going to be in view.
I loved Confess, Fletch. It's not changing the face of cinema, nor attempting to, but it's just massively entertaining, and simply so, without big pyrotechnics or chase sequences or special effects. It coasts entirely along based off great performances from Hamm, Marcia Gay Harden, Roy Wood Jr., Annie Mummalo and more, weaving a convoluted mystery that is not meant to be solved so much as unraveled. We need at least another half dozen of these please.
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Alice, Sweet Alice [aka. Communion aka Holy Terror] (1976, d. Alfred Sole- Xumo)
This was a recommendation from the Roger Avery/Quentin Tarantino podcast
Video Archives during their assessment of "American Giallo" (American films that best emulate the Italian hyper-violent murder-mysteries made famous by Dario Argento and Mario Bava)
Once you get past the awkward timing of nearly every scene, there's a rather gripping murder-mystery/suspense thriller here that starts with a child's murder for which another child is blamed. I knew going in that titular Alice wasn't the murderer, but I think if you went in cold, it would only be the first act, at most, that you would suspect Alice of the crime. There really wasn't a bigger plan here to deceive the audience.
The actual murderer is revealed at the end of the second act, which then spends time with them, givings us some insight into who they are and why they're doing what they're doing. It's a little disjointed from act to act, as the focus shifts from one character to the next, and sadly Alice is pretty much gone from the film's second half, but somehow it all hangs together quite well.
There are some surprising attacks and murders, and that great, soupy, bright red 70's blood is put to great effect (a great overhead shot of a body laying in the gutter as rain pours down, the blood pool expanding rapidly in the wetness. Director sole may not have been able to draw the most natural performances out of his actors, nor edit the film smoothly, but he knows where to put the camera. This film revolves a lot around the church, and I don't quite grok the exact message (except to say that religion creates murderous zealots) but it's obviously not one that thinks highly of Catholicism.
