Tag: movies

Movies by year – found post

The Moon is Blue

From Here to EternityBack in 2008(!), I started a post referencing movies by year, beginning with when I was born. Clearly, there must have been some source that listed the leading films from each period.

1953
Favorite: From Here to Eternity
Runners-up: The Glenn Miller Story; Roman Holiday
Great films of that year I have yet to see: The Moon Is Blue; Call Me Madame
Worst film of that year I have seen: The Robe
Mostly want to see The Moon is Blue because it as referred to in an episode of the TV show MAS*H.

1954
Favorite: Rear Window
Runners-up: On the Waterfront; A Star Is Born
Great films of that year I have yet to see: Carmen Jones; White Christmas
Worst film of that year I have seen: ??
It may be that Rear Window ranks ahead on Oscar winner On the Waterfront because I saw the Hitchcock film in the theater when it was re-released, while I saw the Kazan film on TV. Carmen Jones intrigues me because it’s an update of the Bizet opera Carmen in an African-American setting

1955
Favorite: Lady and the Tramp
Runners-up: Oklahoma!; Mister Roberts
Great films of that year I have yet to see: Marty; The Rose Tattoo
Worst film of that year I have seen: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, by default
Lady and the Tramp made $80 million. The runner-up is Cinerama Holiday, a movie now so obscure that it doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia post, made $12 million. The third was Mister Robers with $8.5 million.

Two MASH references

1956
Favorite: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Runners-up: The King and I; Carousel
Great films of that year I have yet to see: Lust for Life; Anastasia
Worst film of that year I have seen: The Ten Commandments, easily
The big b.o. that year was my worst pic that year.

I didn’t get far when the list inexplicably skipped to 1970, which was repeated about six dozen times! Weird.

1970
Favorite: Patton
Runners-up: Catch-22, MAS*H
Great films of that year I have yet to see: Brewster McCloud, Five Easy Pieces
Worst film of that year I have seen: Myra Breckinridge

But, unlike the ones from the 1950s, these did not seem right. I don’t even remember seeing Patton all the way through or Myra at all. I wasn’t all that fond of Catch-22, which I saw 1.5 times. (Very long story.) Maybe I had filled the record with dummy information?

 

Movie review: Coyote v. Acme

Wile E. Coyote

I thought my wife should consider seeing the movie Coyote v. Acme after we played the July 6 edition of the New York Times Connections.  The blue category was Acme Products Used by Wile E. Coyote; she had no idea.

On the other hand, it was the first category I identified. I saw a LOT of Road Runner cartoons growing up, usually on a variant of The Bugs Bunny Show on Saturday mornings. It wasn’t my favorite segment, as I thought it was a tad repetitive.

Yet the idea of the movie – “After enduring years of malfunctioning products, Wile E. Coyote teams up with a local personal injury attorney to take on ACME, the manufacturer of anything and everything used by the Looney Tunes characters” – seemed rich with possibility.

So I was mildly peeved that Warner Brothers intended to shelve the completed film in late 2023 to get a tax write-off. Other people were more vocal, and the public outrage prompted the filmmakers to look for another distributor.

What’s in a law firm name?

The film’s appeal started early for me. In 2022, Wile E. Coyote saw a TV ad for “Avery, Jones & Maltese, a personal injury law firm in Albuquerque specializing in cartoon violence cases involving Acme products.” The firm was named for Tex Avery, “crucial in the creation and evolution of famous animated characters such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd,” and Chuck Jones, who “wrote, produced, and/or directed many classic animated cartoon shorts starring Bugs, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner,” and others.

I thought the third name refers to the late actor Peter Lorre. In the movie, “in 1992, in a world where cartoon characters co-exist amongst humans, Acme Corporation scientist Dr. Lorre leaks a message to an unknown contact before being captured and imprisoned inside an Acme portable hole.” An animated version of Lorre appeared in several Warner Brothers cartoons. Maltese refers to Lorre’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, which I have not seen.

But my friend Mayor noted that Maltese referred to Michael Maltese, one of the writers for Warner Bros. “He also wrote many cartoons for Hanna-Barbera!”

The law firm, headed by Kevin Avery (Will Forte), was used to settling for small sums.  But at his client’s urging, he and his eager, budding lawyer niece, Paige (Lana Condor), take on the ACME juggernaut, represented by a cocky corporate lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena).

The cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn, the CEO of the Acme Corporation, reminds me of a current US Senator. I mean that in a non-complimentary way re: the senator, but it’s a fair description of the rooster.

“beep, beep” or “meep, meep”?

I liked the movie quite a bit; we saw it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany at a Friday matinee. What interested me more was that my wife liked it a lot, as a David v. Goliath story, which seems very current. The pieces of the mystery came together with familiar characters like Elmer Fudd, Tweety, Granny, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and, of course, the Road Runner, who played a pivotal and surprising role.

It received positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes: 96% from critics and 95% from audiences.  The critics’ consensus: “A daffy satire that’s equal parts heart and wily humor.” Groan.

Movie review: The Odyssey

“faithful” to the source material?

My wife and I saw the film The Odyssey at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany a couple of weekends ago, and I somehow neglected to write about it. Busyness has its costs.

I’ll admit to never having read the book/books; he also referenced Homer’s The Iliad and other period pieces.  So I have no feeling about whether Christopher Nolan was “faithful” to the source material, though I find the debate endlessly fascinating. It’s a three-hour movie, not thirty.

 The movie is vast and often impressive, especially visually. I thought the first palace-intrigue, extended scene dragged a bit, though the pacing improved after that.

The action scenes are memorable. Because of my lack of foreknowledge, the Cyclops, many of the storms, and the Circe’s magic narrative took me by surprise. What was particularly striking was the treatment of Circe’s magic; someone suggested correctly that it recalled “the unsettling body horror of David Cronenberg rather than traditional fantasy spectacle.”

Yet I thought the recapitulation of the Troy was what I found most unnerving. It was the point that Odysseus (Matt Damon) seemed to grasp the consequences of the “battle.” 

A lot of the debate about the film centered on the religious content. A story from Religion Unplugged pondered, “No Divine Powers: Where Are All The Gods In Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’?” Yet my wife and I spent the ride home very conscious of the film’s faith basis. “Many have noted that [Nolan] conflates aspects of Homer’s religion with Christianity and modernity.” This is a fair point. 

Still, it rated a 93% (critics)/97% (fans) positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I didn’t love it, but I was glad to see it in the theater, at least until…

Technical difficulties

The real problem, though, was technical – not Nolan’s fault but the Spectrum’s. If you’ve ever played a DVD in a player and it momentarily sticks, you’ll get some idea. It happened a couple of times about 2/3s of the way through. But in the extended consequential fight scene, it happened frequently, not severe enough that we couldn’t make out the dialogue, but it was mightily distracting.

I mentioned this to the ticket seller after the film, and he said he’d let someone know. Meh.   

I recently saw an interesting piece in the Boston Globe (behind a paywall): ‘The Odyssey’ and the death of the Hollywood epic. The year’s most celebrated film is destined to be forgotten. “From opening title card to closing credits, “The Odyssey” is a nearly three-hour barn burner, racing from event to event with whirlwind kinetic energy. Blink, and you’ll miss some roaring fire, raucous tempest, or piggy sorceress on the spinning carousel of adventure. Nolan’s film zooms along as though locked into a high-speed drag race with the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise.

“That’s why it’s so forgettable.” This was not my experience, but time literally will tell.

Even before seeing the film, I enjoyed the story of thirteen-year-old Mason Cufari, from Rotterdam, Schenectady County, who played young Sinon. 

Brunello: The Gracious Visionary

Brunello Cucinelli, The King of Cashmere

BrunelloOn its very last day at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany, my wife and I attended a matinee of the film Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, even though I had no idea what it was about.

Per Rotten Tomatoes, it’s “an inside look at the extraordinary life and career of the man behind a luxury fashion empire built on the principles of humanity and artistry,” Brunello Cucinelli.

It’s an odd yet interesting device to have actors show him growing up in a rural agricultural community, while the now-70+ Brunello makes asides about the situation. His family lived on land they didn’t own, so the landlord came by annually, imploring the children not to go to school but to stay home and help their parents. The parents ignored the advice.

Young Brunello excelled at school, especially in math. This would help him play cards, initially with family. But the young man and his siblings still had to come home to do chores. Nevertheless, he found rural life idyllic.

His father and other relatives decided to move to the city and work at the factory. Soon, it was clear that his father was disappointed in the sterile work environment. 

Adrift

Brunello was a young man without a plan, hanging around a local establishment and winning money at cards. When he got a girlfriend, he bumbled into a brief gig as a fashion model. His affection for angora wool reminded him of the rabbit fur that he and his siblings would comb out. 

When he decided to start a factory, his building design, with windows to the outside rather than sterile walls, arose directly from his father’s unsatisfactory experience. He became “The King of Cashmere.”

Brunello noted in The Cut that making the film  he wanted was so that “50 years down the line, when my grandchildren and others look at the movie, for them to say, ‘This is what my grandfather, my great-grandfather thought as he was still alive.'”

There were oodles of celebrity tributes, from Oprah Winfrey, Patrick Dempsey (“McDreamy),  Formula One chief executive Stefano Domenicali and others. 

Is it hagiography? Well, sure. Does it work anyway? It didn’t for most of the RT critics, who were only 27% positive. IMDb was more generous at 7.2 out of 10, though with more one-star reviews than two- to six-star combined.

But my wife and I liked it for two reasons. It was beautifully filmed by  Giuseppe Tornatore, who made Cinema Paradiso. 

More importantly,  we were taken by the “‘philosopher-designer’ revered for his distinctive integration of humanistic values, craftsmanship, and ethical entrepreneurship.” He called it “humanistic capitalism,” which essentially meant one can make money while encouraging the workers, creating an inviting place to work, etc. When COVID hit, he promised to keep his employees paid for up to two years.

So we bought into the messaging. It didn’t feel particularly self-serving for a guy who’s been in business for a half century. Check out the website, especially the section on the company and the value of human dignity.

Movie review: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Gatsby”/Lolita/Daisy Miller/Pride and Prejudice

My wife recommended that we go to the Spectrum 8 Theatre and watch the movie Reading Lolita in Tehran. I’m almost always interested in seeing movies unfamiliar to me, so we attended on a Thursday afternoon; alas, only one other person was present.

I will admit that I was unfamiliar with the non-fiction book by Iranian author and academic Azar Nafisi, published in 2003. It is based on her own experiences while teaching English literature at the University of Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.”

The film seems to hew closely to the book, but it does not necessarily follow its chronology. After the fall of the Shah of Iran, Azar (Golshifteh Farahani) and her husband Bijan (Arash Marandi) return to their homeland, expecting more freedom.

Unfortunately, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini meant a different change. She gets pushback, initially from a young man in her class, who thinks there was nothing redeeming about The Great Gatsby because of the moral turpitude of the main couple – adultery!  The country increasingly becomes more restrictive. 

“Gatsby” for 1979 was the first piece,  followed by “Lolita” (1995), Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” (1988), and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1996).

The professor ultimately gets fired from her position. Society requires the hijab. Her ultimate response was to teach these classes – for women only for a variety of reasons. It’s in those discussions, shown in much brighter hues than much of the rest of the film, that allow great insights about liberation.

My favorite involved Pride and Prejudice, where the professor explains how conveying dialogue and even flirtation in the midst of regimented dance.

Pretty good

This was a good, not great movie. One is already in the movie’s corner going in. The episodic nature of the film didn’t always gel. It was still worthwhile, because, as Peter Travers noted in his 2.5 stars-out-of-4 review,  “Today, the book banning strikes a raw nerve in America, the country the women once regarded as a haven for freedom seekers.”

(A recent example:  South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing. “The instructor, Vinita Prabhakar, said in an interview that she had taught the story in her classes for nearly a decade without incident.”)

Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie an 86% positive rating, but not enough audience patrons viewed the film to comment. 

The film was made in Italy, and some narratives were fictionalized to protect some of the real people portrayed. It was released originally in 2024, but didn’t make it to the US until July 2026.