Thoughts on Opening Night

 On Criterion in April 2021, I watched the 1977 film Opening Night, starring Gena Rowlands as a stage actress in previews for her new show, and struggling with anxiety over her age and getting older, as well as being deeply affected by the accidental death of a young teenage fan she briefly met, choosing to create a new internal character based on her when performing in order to not feel empty anymore. I thought it was a little long at two and a half hours, and some scenes that dragged could have been cut, but overall, it was pretty good.

Rowlands is one of my favorite actresses, because I love her throaty voice (I thought she was from the Bronx, but she’s from Wisconsin and moved to NYC when she was young), her glamour, and how my grandma resembled her a little, so it feels a little familiar to me. Her character Evelyn doesn’t want to play middle-aged women because she’s worried that’s all she will be cast as, and doesn’t want to accept that she is nearly fifty, still wanting to feel youthful and vibrant. So in defiance, she plays her stage character in a marital drama like a much younger woman, ad-libbing onstage and having free-spirited monologues, which entertains the audience but frustrates her director (Ben Gazarra). She goes on more of a journey of self-discovery, dealing with her career and age and status as a woman, and ends up having a lost time on opening night, where she is missing from the theater, shows up heavily late and completely bombed, and the crew have to stall the impatient audience and get her stage-ready through makeup and black coffee, and pray she won’t bomb onstage.

I haven’t seen much of John Cassavetes’ movies. Besides this, I’ve seen Gloria, Minnie and Moskowitz, Shadows, and his acting in Edge of the City. He acts in this as well, as Rowlands’ costar in the play, and was decent, having a greyed and lean handsomeness to him, he was about fifty at the time.

I was happy to see Joan Blondell in one of her last roles (she was also in Grease), I forgot how much I had liked her in her 1930s movies as a funny best friend or screwball heroine. She was more elderly here and slowed down, but still had that wit about her, playing someone who cared about Rowlands but was skeptical about her mental state at the same time.

Rowlands is nearly 91 now, and basically retired now, her last credits were a feature in 2014 and a short in 2017. I love her warm and tough presence onscreen. My favorite films of her have been Gloria, Unhook the Stars, Night on Earth, Paris Je’Taime, and Hysterical Blindness.

Thoughts on Lady in a Cage

 On Hulu in April 2021 I watched Lady in a Cage, a 1964 “hagsploitation” thriller in which Olivia de Havilland is a old rich woman with a hip disability who is stuck in her home elevator when the electricity goes out, and she is terrorized by a crew of home invaders, featuring a young and hairy-chested James Caan. It was pretty fun to watch, it felt like a TV movie of the week, with a lot of Twilight Zone-style music cues by Paul Glass and a Saul Bass-inspired opening credits sequence.

Joan Crawford was originally tapped to star in this, but turned it down. The “hagsploitation” term comes from a sexist and ageist view of aging Hollywood actresses in the 1960s, who would be cast in campy thrillers to either be the cackling villain or be screaming in distress. A lot of these came after the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, like the similarly-titled Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, also starring de Havilland.

I thought it was interesting that a late plot reveal is that de Havilland’s son is gay and closeted, given that the actor who played him, William Swan, was also gay, and died in 2019 at 90. The movie itself is rough and loud, with a lot of yelling from the hoodlum crew, and as noted in the IMDB trivia, Caan was trying to model his performance after Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, so he spends a lot of this movie strutting in an open shirt and looking like a hustler.

I liked this a lot, I thought it was messy and abrasive and slightly campy, particularly when de Havilland puts a deep, rough emphasis on the words “animal orgy” to describe the crooks’ glee in destruction.

This trailer is pretty funny, with de Havilland introducing it and playing up the “fear” of watching it alone, as well as the cliched labels for characters (The hustler! The wino! The weirdo! The wildo!) and the embarrassingly bad dialogue (“Help! I am. trapped. in. small. private. elevator!”). It’s fun to watch, but cringing too at the same time.

ETA: I just rewatched the trailer, and it just gives away the ending when de Havilland fights back against Caan by stabbing him in the eyes. It’s a good scene, and the trailer shouldn’t have spoiled that.

Thoughts on Hard Eight

In April 2021, I watched Hard Eight on Criterion, and really dug it a lot. It’s the 1996 directorial debut of Paul Thomas Anderson, a noir film starring a tightly packed cast of Philip Baker Hall as a seasoned con man/gambler, John C. Reilly as the hapless loser he picks up to pull off a low-level con job in a Vegas casino, Gwyneth Paltrow as a sex worker/cocktail waitress who tails around with them and gets caught up in some complicated situations, and Samuel L. Jackson as a security guard with a slick attitude who knows Hall’s actual background and hidden connection to Reilly. I loved how this movie felt so compact with such a small main cast, and it was suspenseful with a lot of fantastic character drama and underground shadiness. Plus, an up and coming Philip Seymour Hoffman has a standout scene as an obnoxious douche with mullet-y hair quietly irritating Hall at the craps table, and who undergoes his own sad transformation within a couple of minutes.

And this was likely filmed around the time that Jackson was in The Long Kiss Goodnight, because he closely resembles his character from there in this film.

Thoughts on A New Leaf

Thanks to Be Kind Rewind, I watched Elaine May’s A New Leaf in March 2021 on Criterion, and really liked it a lot. It’s a darkly humored romantic comedy from 1971 in which Walter Matthau plays a recently bankrupt egotist who decides to marry and murder a woman for her money, and Elaine May, who wrote and directed the film, plays an awkward botanist who is also an heiress. It’s a funny courtship in which he thinks she’s odd and peculiar, but trying to romance her, and she’s kind of in her own world of plants but agrees to marry him, and he’s trying to plot the best way to murder her while she’s oblivious to his real intentions, and he is slowly falling for her good heart and hesitating on his plans. It sounds weird, but it is played off in a funny and charming way of two square dorks played by comedic legends against each other. I really adored this, and as I don’t know a lot about Elaine May apart from her collaborations with Mike Nichols, this was a great introduction. She’s great at playing clumsy and awkward, and I could imagine that Diane Keaton took some influence from her in her screen persona from this role, more so the cute and eccentric part with big glasses and hats.

As explained in the video link (the A New Leaf part starts at 8:15), the studio cut is not what May had intended, fighting the studio to release her version of the film, with a different ending and other scenes. So it’s not entirely her vision, but I still think it’s a gem.

Thoughts on The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Stargate, Dick Johnson is Dead, and Coming 2 America

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek: a 1944 film by Preston Sturges that had to have been controversial when it came out. Betty Hutton plays a teen girl named Trudy Kockenlocker who goes to a goodbye dance for soldiers off to fight in WWII, and has a crazy drunken night going off to different parties, and the next day, is married and pregnant and can’t remember what happened or who it was with. (This can also have darker implications, but I’m just going to keep it light and assume it was all consensual). She used a fake name on the marriage certificate that she can’t remember, and has this loud oaf of a constable father that she’s afraid to confront, while her 14-year old sister seems a lot wiser beyond her years. Enter Eddie Bracken as Norval Jones, a sort of Mickey Rooney knockoff but dorkier and stuttering a lot, who looks both old and young at the same time, who has wanted Betty Hutton for ages and wants to help her save face by marrying her to avoid scandal. I was surprised at how good he was at physical comedy and pratfalls, and was pretty likable despite his weird impish face, which he outright calls homely. This was a pretty hilarious movie with some more daring post-Hayes Code humor for the time, and what would now seem like hacky comedy came off as funnier and more fresh back then. Betty Hutton was really cute and endearing in playing up her guilt and confusion over the lost night, and I especially liked Diana Lynn as her smartass sister who kept narrowly missing a kick in the rear by their dad, who just slips and falls with each kick attempt.

Stargate: the 1994 sci-fi blockbuster by Roland Emmerich, that I was amazed by when I was 11, but have mixed reactions to now. I love the buildup to it, the slow and nervous walk to the Stargate, the contrast in performances by James Spader as a science nerd and Kurt Russell as a military leader, and the setting of an ancient Egyptian culture on a faraway planet. All of that was creative and interesting. But I lost interest in the villain backstory and his role, where I just didn’t care. The god Ra possesses a young boy and steals the life force of humans to stay alive. But he arrives nearly 90 minutes into the movie, and I just couldn’t care about the villain’s plan, it felt stock and boring. I know the TV show did a much better job elaborating his story and giving him more of a character, the movie just made him more into a dull villain added way too late into the film.

Though when watching it, I kept thinking this movie felt like an out of character choice for Spader, since at that time, most of his films were either psychosexual thrillers or playing twisted villains, and seeing his play a more ordinary nerdy professor felt like less of a challenge. Well, the trivia I learned confirmed that, as he was apparently difficult to work with because he didn’t like science fiction, and kept asking what his character’s motivation and reasoning was. I half-expected Emmerich to just throw up his hands and be like “If we give your character a weird sexual fetish, would that make you happy?!” I think Spader just needs to play someone with quirks to be interesting, but more like unnerving weirdos, not full-on Johnny Depp quirk antics.

Dick Johnson is Dead: a 2020 documentary by Kirsten Johnson, in which she copes with the near-imminent losing of her octogenarian father by staging humorous death scenes with her father’s consent, complete with a whole film crew, fake blood effects, and stuntmen. She’s struggling with her father’s mortality, a funny and gregarious man who lost his wife to Alzheimer’s several years prior, and has been struggling with his own memory loss issues. This film has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards, and I really liked how it mixed the darkly comic sequences of his “deaths” with the more touching scenes of them and her kids, bonding more as a family and sharing old stories. It was a really unique and interesting film that I enjoyed watching a lot. I also lost my grandmother last year, so I likely had some subconscious resonance with it.

Coming 2 America: a 2021 sequel by Craig Brewer to the 1988 film. I thought it was just OK, but felt like a PG-13 sanitized version of the original, it felt too safe. I liked the callbacks to the first movie, but I mostly found Akeem’s son, who Akeem finds out about thirty years after he came to Queens, to be boring and not very interesting, he was just “there.” It tries to do the same story beats as the original, but didn’t have the same cult appeal that made it quotable or funny in the first place, it just felt like a very average but unmemorable sequel.

Thoughts on Minari, Nomadland, and Hello, My Name is Doris

Minari: a really good family drama from 2020 directed by Lee Issac Chung starring Steven Yeun as the patriarch of a Korean family living in 1980s Arkansas and trying to get by in their trailer home and his gardening job in producing heritage vegetables in Korean cuisine. I liked how intimate the film felt, based on the director’s childhood, and how the mom was feeling stifled and frustrated by the family’s limited options in contrast to the dad’s big promises of success. It felt very warm and real and honest, and I loved the grandma in it, how she was bawdy and funny and how the kids would one day appreciate that she wasn’t the usual storybook grandma they thought they wanted.

Nomadland: a really beautiful drama directed by Chloe Zhao from 2020 about people affected by the 2008 recession and living rural, nomadic lives in 2011 in the U.S., working seasonal jobs and escaping stagnant lives at home, without much of a future to see. Frances McDormand and David Straitharn are the big names in it, but the film’s power comes from its unprofessional actors largely playing versions of themselves, with characters ranging from a 75-year old woman with terminal cancer living on the road in her trailer with plans to die by her own hand in Alaska, to a wayward young man with addiction issues missing a distant girlfriend, to a lonely old man whose son died from addiction and not being able to cope with outliving his son. It’s a slow and quiet film that I really enjoyed, and I felt at peace with it.

Hello, My Name is Doris: an indie comedy from 2015, directed by Michael Showalter, starring Sally Field as an eccentric old woman with quirky fashion sense and hoarding issues who falls for a much younger coworker of hers (Max Greenfield), and is obsessed with her crush on him. It’s both a little sad to see his Brooklyn hipster crowd treat her like a pet, while also feeling sympathy for her as a much older woman who still feels vital and youthful in her heart, while also sad to see her in denial about her hoarding mental health issues. Sally Field is really great in this movie, she just embodies this character so well with heart and humor and understanding from age and experience.

Thoughts on Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet

 I was in the mood in February 2021 for a double feature of Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet. They are usually paired together as companion pieces, as it’s when Disney in the early 2000s tried some risks with more CGI animation and genre-bending stories, and both films flopped.

Of the two, I like Atlantis better. Even if it copies some aspects of Stargate (similar plot about discovering a lost ancient world, the lead a nerdy young professor trying to get funding for his proposal, an old mentor taking his theories seriously, taking a motley crew to the faraway world), I still thought it was gorgeous to look at, with a story about an indigenous culture fighting against colonists, and really a lot of fun to watch with a likable oddball crew. Sometimes I thought Michael J. Fox having a too recognizable voice was distracting, but I liked Cree Summer as Kida and hearing Jim Varney in his last role.

Treasure Planet had strengths with it being a weird mix of Treasure Island, steampunk, characters in 1700s-era clothing, and space travel, but I didn’t find the actual story interesting, despite that I know it’s a classic adventure story. I just couldn’t get invested in the characters or story, I just liked the aesthetic and creative blends. Also, the Johnny Rzeznik music took me out of the movie, it was way too 90s alternative rock to fit into this movie’s world.

So this was just interesting to watch these two movies back to back and compare them for my own fun.