Movie Notes: A Day at the Races

A Day at the Races (1937)
Director: Sam Wood

This isn't the best of the Marx Brothers.  It's a bit too tame, too long, and it is tainted by the unfortunate racist climate of the era.

The two best comedic bits are the phone conversation between the Florida medical board and Whitemore, and the examination of Mrs. Upjohn.  The examination sequence descends into true Marxian anarchy, and brings life to this otherwise staid picture.  Chico and Harpo's musical number was OK, too.  Oh, and I liked Harpo's examination scene, ending with a novocaine shot to the leg.

The other sequence in the movie with real energy is the dance sequence by the barn.  It's that sort of contained African-American expression that is regrettable today, but the performers far outclass the musical numbers of their white counterparts.

Movie Notes: Love Actually

Love Actually (2003)
Director: Richard Curtis

A Christmas fantasy about love where almost everyone gets exactly what they want.  It's very well done, and very fun.  It's just so patently unrealistic that I assume it's intentionally so.  At which point, I wonder, why?  I don't know.

The most compelling (by far) of the many stories is that involving the relationship between Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman.  Which makes it the most intriguing thematically as it is the only one that has its feet flat on the ground the whole time.  Is the whole movie essentially pessimistic?  Is the only real experience of love we can expect one of difficulty and pain?  Is it a criticism of sappy romantic love stories?  Is the pain just background to accentuate the unrealistic joy?

Movie Notes: Trainspotting

Trainspotting (1996)
Director: Danny Boyle

A thrillingly paced and orchestrated merry go-round of debauchery and the horror of empty chests.  The movie's well made, but it has nothing significant to contribute to your life, so it's not worth it's baptism into stimulated depression.

Movie Notes: Stagecoach

Stagecoach (1939)
Director: John Ford

My four-star first impression of Stagecoach upon my first viewing was that it was a very fun western.  I now think it's something more than that.

Stagecoach is a film, like Casablanca, that exploits stereotypes as archetypes to address real issues at a fundamental moral level as popular entertainment.  This is about as good as Hollywood ever got during its Golden Age to making art -- which is to say Hollywood could do quite well!  It's broad-stroke art, with little enough nuance, but a great deal of depth communicated via short-hand.  Ford communicates so much with a camera that, as a crash course in the art of film in preparing to make Citizen Kane, Orson Welles is said to have watched Stagecoach over forty times.

It's so beautiful.  Monument Valley crowned with majestic clouds.  Horses, riders, and stagecoaches rolling along at break-neck speeds.  Dallas exiting the low adobe house through a long hallway, the encroaching feeling of civilization that communicates.  This is film as film!

The stereotypes, and perhaps more interesting, their relationships, are compelling.  The City, the Desert, and Man; Civilization, the Savage, and the Outcast.  Inside the stagecoach, the characters get to know each other, confront their own selves, and make difficult choices.  Most of them will have a chance at redemption, but only two will truly escape themselves and the "blessings of civilization."

Movie Notes: A Matter of Life and Death

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Directors: Powell and Pressburger

This was an interesting film, and I mean that in the very best sense.

The movie's plot, in a nutshell, is that the British pilot of a WWII Lancaster survives, against all odds, his fall from his shot-up plane over the coast of England without a parachute.  Afterward, he meets the last person to whom he had spoken, an American radio operator with whom he falls in love, and Death -- in the form of an effete French gentleman who attempts to convince him to die.  The movie's plot travels forward in parallel: a technicolor production on earth wherein a neuroscientist and his new found love work to save his life, and a black-and-white drama in heaven where he appeals his death sentence to the highest court.

Heady stuff this, but the production rises to the occasion in its own peculiar style.  David Niven is very good, and I like the look and sound of Roger Livesey, but in this film his single-tone manner of delivering lines got a bit old.

The movie, shot during the last days of the war, is eminently timely.  Death is an ever-present reality, but to say it is more immediate during wartime is to trivialize that very real horror.  Heaven is shown to be very large, and young men in flying uniforms are constantly passing through its doors.  Other doors are also referenced, and the scale and scope of this catastrophe is thereby portrayed both cleverly and poignantly.

All in all, this is a movie I'd recommend!

Movie Notes: Les Miserables

Les Miserables (2012)
Director: Tom Hooper

Libby and I went to this movie as dedicated fans of the musical.  We love the Christian story of redemption wrapped up in the life of Jean Valjean, and get carried away by the emotionally charged music every time we watch it.  That made us soft targets for this movie, and I think it basically delivered.

Hooper really did his best work with Fantine's story arc.  He and Anne Hathaway so accurately captured her suffering that I completely ceased to be entertained, and was wholly disgusted with the evil of the world.  That's a powerful piece of art, and while I was sitting there in emotional pain, I thought of Augustine's argument against tragedy in his Confessions.  Are people entertained by this?  Do I expect to be entertained by this?

I was entertained by Valjean's conversion scene.  I appreciated the way the camera captured and channeled the tension of the moment in that church.  I thought, when he threw his papers off the top of the mountain, that we'd see a little stronger parallel between that moment and Javert's moment of decision than we did (at least in the cinematography).

I liked the live singing.  I thought Jackman did it particularly well.  I really have no complaints about the cast. Even Russell Crowe didn't bother me, despite the fact that he sang completely differently than everyone else.