Laura (1944) - Rewatch
The men in Laura’s life are unable to control their desires whether she’s alive and present or presumed dead. Otto Preminger’s camera is likewise obsessed lighting and framing Gene Tierney as an object. Despite her job presenting other women as mannequins, the script allows Laura to battle through the cross-talk and begin to show us the woman she is. Perhaps the purest example of a femme fatale, even if sadness rather than manipulation is the dominant note in her personality. This zips along and nothing Dana Andrews’s unconventional investigative techniques can do will stop it.
The Peanuts Movie (2015)Charlie Brown can’t cope when he finds himself in the most complex story he’s ever had. There’s an equation somewhere that links the amount you pay for a cinema ticket to the running time of a movie. If you pay so much for a ticket, you do not want to be short-changed on the number of frames. This should not be 88 minutes long. The Peanuts universe thrives on simplicity both in terms of plot and set-pieces. This stretches the characters beyond anecdote and into narrative, losing a portion of the magic along the way.
Fyre (2019)Influence finds its nemesis in the Bahamas. The promotion of not only lifestyle but mind-style, comes crashing from the rails in a whirlwind of logistical ineptitude and schadenfreude. Billy McFarland finds the problem with advertising the fantasy of exclusivity is too many people want to share it. Not a problem when they’re buying tickets, much more of a problem when they all arrive. Especially if you have no sense of self or situational awareness and have had your anger surgically replaced with charm. Essentially a talking heads documentary, but with good access to the main players and their social media streams.
Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914)All Mabel Normand wants to do is meet her prospective fiancee for an evening of high jinx in a classy hotel, but her dog intervenes. A simple canvas that permits Mabel Normand to film herself as a wide-eyed and pyjama-ed minx, and Charlie Chaplin to establish the Tramp as a womanising sot with no boundaries. There’s nothing more to this than well-executed farce and slapstick and as such is pure fun. Like most of this material it ends in a clumsy fist-fight and the canine ex-machina disappears to no one’s obvious concern, but by then who cares?
Interstellar (2014)Christopher Nolan lays the physics on a bit too thickly. A film celebrated more for its production than it is as a film. Somewhere inside the wonder of the universe draped in its magnificently inescapable equations, the frail story got lost and forgotten. The muscularity of its veneration of hard physics over the fundamentals of the process of science is intimidating, boorish and unrefined. Like all Christopher Nolan’s films, it’s marvellously constructed. The craft can be appreciated even if the design is lacking.
Lonely Are the Brave (1962)Kirk Douglas embarks on a one-man mission in search of a Western to star in. Earnest, sorrowful, stark and concerned with the margins of society. Proto-New Hollywood aesthetics and character, the focus is on mood and acting. This is an elegy to the cowboy. Endeavouring to ride off into the night if not the sunset, the modern world intrudes. It tramples over the romance of a time and place free of laws and fences. Inevitably, the film is overly compassionate about its subject and contaminated by uncritical nostalgia.
Aces High (1976)Malcolm McDowell is the drunken blue-eyed poster child of aerial dogfighting. Rarely have upper lips been this stiff. The sole selling points are biplane combat and wartime nationalism. This film consists of miniatures crashing into forests before bursting into fireballs, matte planes chasing other matte planes across the sky, and close-ups of machine-gun barrels. It’s never clear exactly what’s going on or indeed why. There’s an attempt at the tragedy of war, but it doesn’t hit home. Any criticism of the futility of WWI is lost in a hail of bullets.
Smokey and the Bandit (1977)Burt Reynolds dispels nihilism from the American road movie and boosts the sales of Trans Ams. Simultaneously venerates Southern US car culture and asserts that smuggling beer and clam chowder, of uncertain but illegal origin, is a victimless crime. US law enforcement reverts from the Aviator-clad, fascistic psycho stereotype to its primitive Keystone Cop era. The chemistry between Burt Reynolds and Sally Field is the magic that cements the car-based action set-pieces together. Laid back fun with few consequences.
Catwalk: Tales from the Catshow Circuit (2018)Bobby and Oh La La have the world of Canadian catshows in their claws. It’s an odd criticism of a documentary entirely focused on catshows, but there aren’t enough cats in this film. Fast-edited into the margins, instead we get long interviews with their owners. We learn that cat ladies are people too and very little else. The competitive structure of this was played up, but was of little consequence. The audience is left to dub-in the inner monologue of the cats on their own. Perhaps that’ll be on one of the commentary tracks on the Blu-Ray release?