Thoughts on Spencer

I watched Spencer, directed by Pablo Larrain (Jackie), as it just hit Hulu, and really liked it a lot. I normally am not interested in anything about the British royal family, but I liked how this felt more like a psychological horror film. They could have dialed it back on the screeching string music, but I liked how it depicted Princess Diana feeling like she was going to hyperventilate from being stuck with the stifling royal family that are all about appearances, and how she and Prince Charles seem to be married in name only, as they are often distant from each other and Charles speaks to her in obvious contempt, viewing her as “hysterical.”

Kristen Stewart really was great in this, I had my doubts. But she embodied this role, with this pained smile, tight body language, posh accent trying hard to sound polite but cracking underneath, and seemingly only being her fun, genuine self with her sons and friend Maggie (Sally Hawkins, playing a warm and funny confidante as a connection to the “real world”). I’m hit or miss on Stewart, mostly liking her in Still, Alice, Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sils Maria, and older films like Speak and The Runaways, but she was really good in this.

I liked the slightly grainy film quality, and how it felt like a haunted house movie, with Diana having visions of Anne Boleyn as a grim foreboding future as a prisoner in this elite family. While I generally don’t care about the royal family drama, and never watched any of the Princess Diana TV/film depictions prior to this, I did like the claustrophobic feeling of this film, and how isolating it looked for her to hardly have any friends while being stuck out in a country estate with her family. I’m glad it got some Oscar recognition, it deserved it.

Thoughts on Kansas City

Kansas City (1996) directed by Robert Altman. This felt like Altman, in tribute to his childhood of 1930s Kansas City, wanted to make both a gangster film and a musical, and tried blending it together. It did feel disjointed at times, where Altman clearly seemed more in love with the long free-flowing jazz scenes than the gangster plots, which felt more average to me, save for the performance of Harry Belafonte playing against type as a crime boss/club owner named Seldom Seen, coming off as both charming and menacing.

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a Jean Harlow-wannabe gun moll named Blondie whose loser husband Dermot Mulroney crossed Belafonte’s gang and is being held prisoner, so she abducts Miranda Richardson’s opium-addicted society wife Carolyn to blackmail her campaigning politician husband to get the crime family to release Mulroney in exchange for Richardson. The plot is a long winded mix of political corruption, gangsters, racism (CW: white characters drop racial slurs a lot in this movie), and Depression-era struggles. One of the subplots that interested me more was for a pregnant 14-year old Black girl from Joplin who came to KC to have her baby, and is being guided by a teenage Charlie Parker(Albert J. Burnes). She is largely outside of the main plots, and is like the audience perspective in entering this messed-up world, and largely stays out of their corrupt business.

The movie felt like it jumped around a lot, trying to be loose like jazz music, but also felt like it was all over the place, and more into the fun of its period setting than the story as a whole. I liked the music scenes a lot, and though I usually like Leigh, her “gun moll” voice felt very self-conscious and put-on, like an exaggeration of 1930s Pre-Code heroines, which her character clearly models herself after. I did like how Richardson’s character comes off as a vapid society wife lost in her mind on laudanum, but can be subtly funny, and had this weird dazed vibe to her that I liked, it stood out as more interesting to me.

So I thought this was fine, with good music and some standout performances spread around, but not really great as a whole. But this jazz battle scene is pretty awesome, so I’ll share it here.

Thoughts on Running on Empty

Running on Empty (1988) directed by Sidney Lumet. I had seen this before, and liked rewatching it on Criterion. It’s a family drama where Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti play former 60s radicals whose anti-war bombing of a lab nearly killed someone, and they’ve been fugitives ever since, dragging their sons along to change aliases and backstories every several months, while relying on an underground network of supporters to get by.

Their graduating high school son Danny (River Phoenix) is burnt out by all the moving and secrecy and constant change, and when he has a potential future as a talented pianist and having a loving sharp girlfriend (Martha Plimpton), it threatens to blow up their nomadic life on the run. Phoenix was really great at playing a more adult role while still seeming like a frustrated kid, and I adored Plimpton as this funny rebellious teen girl who felt more fleshed out and not a stock love interest.

I really liked this film because it’s a tight family drama where they seem incredibly loving, but also lowkey abusive and toxic, where the parents are pressuring their sons into never leaving their “unit” and living with the stress and consequences from a crime they weren’t responsible for. I really didn’t like the father, Arthur, who may have been a liberal radical but acts way more like a conservative Boomer, barking orders at his family like a drill sergeant. He just frustrated me whenever he’d shut down dissent or snap at anyone who questioned how unhealthy their way of life was for their kids, and put guilt on them for any kind of social outlet they wanted to have.

Danny is the obvious protagonist to feel for, but I really felt for Lahti’s mother figure, Annie, who is mixed between feeling guilt and remorse for her past while wanting to keep her family together and avoid the Feds. Arguably, one of the best moments of the film is when she sneaks a restaurant meeting with her long-estranged father, reconnecting over their conflicted past in which she blamed him for the war and prejudices, her immature rashness as a youth while still believing in her politics, and trying to set up a safe way out for Danny’s future. Lahti and Steven Hill as her father played this with a lot of heart and weariness, where you could feel both the history and distance between them.

This is a great film, I’m glad I watched it again.

Thoughts on Nightmare Alley

Earlier this month, I watched Nightmare Alley, directed by Guillermo del Toro, as it just hit Hulu. I was mixed on it, as it has a great cast, except for Bradley Cooper. He just seemed miscast, like he doesn’t really belong in a 1940s noir, playing a con man mentalist, and seems too much like a modern-day frat bro type to fit in. I also didn’t like how, despite that it was trying to have an old-fashioned carnival look, it looked too slick to me and artificial, like too much CGI. I think Carnivale, way back from HBO, did it better in making the 1930s carnival look more grimy and lived-in.

The good was that I liked the rest of the cast. Cate Blanchett as a femme fatale in the second half stole the movie and had this slow purring quality to her that I liked, ensnaring Cooper in a scheme to con rich people with fake mind readings that he’s too thick-headed to see how he’s being played. Rooney Mara has this wide-eyed Gothic cartoon look to her that I like, but she also works well in period films, like playing a 1950s shopgirl in Carol. Here she’s a carnival performer with an electricity act who Cooper falls for. The rest of the carnival cast is rounded out by Ron Perlman, Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, David Strathairn, and Clifton Collins, Jr. There’s also a nice cameo by Tim Blake Nelson in the finale, Mary Steenburgen as an older woman grieving her late son through Cooper’s phony séance work, and Richard Jenkins as a seemingly clueless mark.

Toni Collette has a lot of charm in this as a fake mentalist, with long Veronica Lake-style hair, and I thought she was fun, especially with her and Strathairn playing a married couple and teaching Cooper their theater tricks. She isn’t in the movie as much, and I did miss her presence later on.

I felt it was long at two and a half hours, and that while I liked the carnival stuff, it didn’t seem to have much of a plot going on as it was just spending time with characters, and only really got going more once the Blanchett character entered the film (and I didn’t even realize she had a Carol reunion in this with Mara until afterwards). I haven’t seen the original 1940s film, so I can’t compare, but I felt like I enjoyed it in parts, but that the pacing dragged, and that Cooper was badly miscast, he just looked confused and out of place. I’d still recommend it if you want to check out the rest of the cast, the carnival scenes, and Blanchett’s performance.

Thoughts on Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken and White Fang

Last month, on Disney Plus, I watched two early 90s movies I had never seen: Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken and White Fang, both from 1991.

I had vaguely heard of Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken as a kid, from the memorable title, but didn’t know what it was about until many years later. It’s an inspirational horse girl movie about a real-life stunt diver named Sonora Webster, who in the 1920s (1932 in the film) performed in a diving horse show in circuses, which looked pretty cruel and thankfully has been phased out. (Though the movie did take safety measures to protect the horses and the jumps were only from ten feet up, but using optical illusions to make it look like forty feet from a distance). Gabrielle Anwar played Sonora, and did a pretty good Southern accent for a British actor. She’s an orphaned teen in the Depression, whose aunt sees her as a problem and disowns her to an orphanage, so she takes off and ends up joining the circus, learning the craft from the real-life Western figure Dr. W.F. Carver (Cliff Robertson) and his son Al (Michael Schoeffling). I liked her spunkiness and being pushed to succeed past her limitations, even if I didn’t like the stunt she does. She goes blind from an accident, but learns to continue through vibrations and touch, and did it for another 11 years, and lived a long life, dying at age 99 in 2003.

It was a pretty good movie, and Anwar was very likable and charming in it. I did laugh when, for the first half of the movie, she is costumed to look scrappy and disheveled, so much that the diving girl who she eventually replaces tells her that she has “no natural beauty,” when she is obviously beautiful. But I felt the same way with the 1994 Little Women adaptation, when Jo cuts off her hair and is met with being told she lost her “one beauty,” which would make sense if a plainer actress played her, not the gorgeous Winona Ryder.

Michael Schoeffling was handsome but dull as an actor, this was his final acting performance before he retired to create a successful furniture business. I ended up liking Dylan Kussman more as the dorky redhead teen boy who is a hired hand and has an obvious crush on Sonora but no real chance with her next to Schoeffling.

I watched White Fang, the 1991 one with Ethan Hawke. I liked it, it felt a little slower to get into. It felt a little rougher than usual Disney movies, because it starts and ends with disclaimers assuring that animals were not harmed in the film, as there are several dog fighting scenes in the film, a cameo from Bart the Bear, and wolves vs. dogs. It takes place in 1896, and Ethan Hawke plays an orphaned teen boy or young adult who travels to the Yukon Territory from San Francisco to pan for gold and continue his absentee father’s work, and pairs up with guys on a dog sled team to transport a body and search for gold. White Fang (played by Jed, a wolf-dog from The Thing and The Journey of Natty Gann) is a wolf-dog hybrid played by adorable pups whose mother is killed in self-defense by the men, and who dies in front of her pup, which was sad to watch. White Fang is adopted by indigenous people, then blackmailed into selling by an abuser (James Remar) who forces the dog into vicious dog fighting and cages and starves him. Ethan Hawke, who had encounters with the dog, including the dog saving his life from Bart the Bear, rescues White Fang and rehabilitates him to accept love and trust again.

I generally liked it, it didn’t feel as cutesy or as light due to the dog fighting scenes, as well as the frozen dead body being shown, and everyone being rough and a little gruff because it’s how to survive among wolves, bears, and greedy men. I did like that the movie ends with a card saying that wolves shouldn’t be hunted or demonized, and for them not to be endangered or vilified. I thought it was a nice message to end on.

Thoughts on Stormy Monday

Thanks to my friends, I checked out the 1988 British gangster film Stormy Monday, and liked it a lot. It’s the theatrical directorial debut of Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Internal Affairs, One Night Stand), and stars a young Sean Bean as a guy in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne who is just kicking around with a rough past, and goes to work odd jobs for a well-connected nightclub owner (Sting in a quiet and restrained performance). Melanie Griffith is an American waitress who has some charming meet cutes with Bean, but is connected with Tommy Lee Jones’ sleazy corrupt businessman, who’s in town for American Week, and trying to connect a deal with Sting to take over his business, but Sting’s not a pushover, and has his own backup.

The film has this rough charm to it that I liked, and it was refreshing to see Sean Bean in an early role where he’s the hero and a somewhat nice guy, as a contrast to his later Hollywood career as “U.K. villain who gets killed by Harrison Ford or Robert DeNiro or Pierce Brosnan and gets shot/blown up/falls to his death.” It’s just nice seeing him play someone normal.

Griffith was really sweet and cute in this, and her hair looks like it’s leftover from her punk role in the apocalyptic cult movie Cherry 2000 (1988). It’s also funny to see how in young Griffith I can see where Dakota Johnson got her features.

Sting’s character is a jazz fan, so there’s a couple of really cool scenes of live jazz music playing in his club, and it adds to the neo-noir mood of this film that I really sank into and enjoyed.

There’s a fantastic long tracking shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins following Jones and Sting as they have a discussion about Jones’ sleazy tactics and threats to Sting’s life, that is shot from a distance and pans past columns that I really adored. I also really liked a little sexy quiet slow dance scene between Bean and Griffith in a bar as Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” plays on the jukebox, it’s a nice intimate moment between them before shit gets real again with the crime stuff. I included a scene of Griffith late to her waitressing job and having some cute banter with Bean while taking his order, it’s a nice moment that seems mundane but is fun and flirtatious.

Thoughts on Bergman Island

I really enjoyed Bergman Island a lot, a 2021 film by Mia Hansen-Løve that is this slow, walk and talk, artsy movie about art and life blending together, as a filmmaker named Chris (Vicky Krieps), visiting the Swedish island Fårö Island with her filmmaker husband (Tim Roth), is on vacation, doing a residency with her partner as prep for writing screenplays for film projects, and doing some Ingmar Bergman tourism, as Bergman had filmed his 1973 series-turned-compiled film Scenes from a Marriage there, and they stay in a cottage Bergman had lived in, and while Chris’ husband is being celebrated at a local screening of one of his films and taking a guided Bergman group tour, she is wandering around on her own, trying to work out a story for a movie about past loves and attempts at rekindling the nostalgic moments, played out as a story within a story with Mia Wasikowska as Chris’ stand-in.

I liked how quiet and chill this movie was, how it could seem slow but had a good pace that kept it engaging, and though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Bergman film, I did like how the characters are fans of him while acknowledging his faults, like being an absentee father or having overrated films. I liked watching Wasikowska in the internal story, how she comes off as very relaxed and doesn’t have to say much to express her character’s inner anxieties about wanting to rekindle her love with her ex even though they are both partnered, and trying to seem casual on the outside but being psyched by the breadcrumbs of affection he gives her.

I included this Vox article from last year on the film, because the movie ends up blending both the main story and Chris’ fiction story in a way I didn’t get at first, and had to read up on afterwards, as well as how the film is very much about creative artists trying to use the ghost of another visionary artist for inspiration, dealing with love in a long-term comfortable relationship vs. the spark of exciting passion, and how it affects their subconscious as people.